newsletter archives - February, 2004

Volume 9. Issue 2.

[page 1][page 2][page 3] New scanning features in the Black Ice Imaging Toolkits In the constant effort to improve the products, Black Ice Software is announcing several new features which have been added to the Scanning module of the Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX, Image SDK/ActiveX and TIFF SDK/ActiveX products. As an enhancement to the existing batch scanning feature, additional functionality has been added which allows developers to query the state of the scanner’s feeder. When batch scanning is performed and the feeder becomes empty, a callback function specified by the developer can be called to handle the situation. Also, when a new page is successfully scanned, a callback function is called to allow the developer to implement his own saving method if it is needed. The developer now has the option to scan and save all of the pages into file(s), or they can intercept each page as it is scanned and process/store/etc. the file as their application requires. An additional new feature is that the progress bar can be displayed or hidden during the scanning process. Database interface for the Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX The Black Ice Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX has been updated with the new BiDB.DLL and BiDB.OCX control which add support for direct database operations. The purpose of the new functionality is to add a new tool for the developer that can be used to easily store and load images from a database. Storing images in a database is often required in document archiving applications, dynamic web pages, electronic surveillance systems, etc. The images are stored as BLOBs (Binary Large Objects) in the database. The Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX provides several functions to save and load the images to and from a database. The developer can specify the database, table and record where to store the image, and also operations to traverse the next or previous record in a recordset. Using the BiDB.DLL and BiDB.OCX components, the developer can directly write (store) a DIB (bitmap) into the database or read and, using the BiDisp.DLL, display images stored in the database. In addition to DIBs, the Document Imaging SDK/ActiveX can store any supported image file in the database, including TIFF files, which can later be decoded directly from a memory object using the OpenTIFFInMemory() function. Using the OpenTIFFInMemory() function eliminates the time consuming steps of saving the TIFF data to a temporary file before opening it with a TIFF function. The TIFF is created in memory and every operation (conversion, setting or reading TAGs, etc.) is done in memory.

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