Accusoft products in the FormSuite product or other products that are intended to be used with the FormSuite product have built in methods to create and interpret control parameters for their own functionality, and which can be stored in FormDirector objects. This section will briefly cover the concept of using these other Accusoft components to create (write) or interpret (read) these control parameters. For detail on using the functionality of other Accusoft components, see the corresponding help file for that component.

This section will not cover the concept of creating control parameters for third party components to be used in a form processing application.

Applicable Accusoft Components

The following Accusoft components have the ability to write and read control parameters for at least one of the operations that the component is capable of performing.

• FormFix
• BarcodeXpress
• SmartZoneOCR
• SmartZoneICR
• ScanFix Xpress
• MicrXpress

Within these components there are one or more classes that are capable of performing image manipulation or image interpretation (recognition or data acquisition) operations. These classes may have properties to configure the image interpretation operation. Additionally, these classes, or an associated class, may have the capability of writing the settings to a string and reading the settings back from a string. This capability is implemented as the WriteToStream methods and ReadFromStream methods in each one of the applicable classes. These objects performing image manipulation and interpretation loosely implement the command pattern, an object-oriented design pattern.

FormFix

It has four operation classes:

• IdentificationProcessor – used to perform form identification and alignment
• DropOutProcessor – use to create field clips and perform form dropout
• OmrProcessor – used to perform optical mark recognition on a field
• FieldTypeClassificationProcessor - used to perform automatic OCR/ICR field type classification.

Each of these classes has WriteToStream and ReadFromStream methods.

BarcodeXpress

It has one operation class for data acquisition:

• Reader – used to read barcodes

The BarcodeXpress class has the WriteToStream and ReadFromStream methods that control the parameters of the associate Reader object.

SmartZoneOCR

It has one operation class for data acquisition:

• Reader – used to read machine printed text

The SmartZoneOCR class has the WriteToStream and ReadFromStream methods that control the parameters of the associate Reader object.

SmartZoneICR

It has one operation class for data acquisition:

• Reader – used to read hand written characters

The SmartZoneICR class has the WriteToStream and ReadFromStream methods that control the parameters of the associate Reader object.

MicrXpress

It has one operation class for data acquisition:

• Reader – used to read MICR characters

The MicrXpress class has the WriteToStream and ReadFromStream methods that control the parameters of the associate Reader object.

ScanFix Xpress

It has one operation class for image manipulation:

• ScanFix (class) – used to perform various image cleanup and manipulation operations.

ScanFix is unique in this group of components, in that it provides an Enhancements class that represents a set of instructions to perform a sequence of image manipulation operations. The Enhancements class has the WriteToStream and ReadFromStream operations.

Creating Control Parameters for Operations of Accusoft Components

The following steps outline the generic process for creating control parameters for an operation implemented by a class in one of the applicable Accusoft components. This is very generic, more detailed steps are given for each component in the How To > Integrate with Other Components section.

1. Create an instance of the component.
2. Create an instance of the operation class (or the Enhancements class for ScanFix).
3. Configure the operation class or enhancement class.
4. Use the associated class (as described above) to write the control parameter to a string, using the WriteToStream method.
5. Store this string in a local variable so that it can be put into a data item. (Storing this string in a data item is described later in the help file.)