Barcodes generation for VF PDF reports

Question

How can we generate barcodes for a VF page rendered as a pdf document. I am not looking for an external website as that might stop working in future. I have seen Gimbal paid app but was wondering if any one knows about of any native solution or are aware of any other appexchange package.

Answer 1

I have personally written a barcode component that works with PDF. It's actually pretty easy. The actual component is self-contained:

<c:barcode codeValue="12345" />

---

---

Edit: Please be careful with this code; it was an early prototype for what was eventually included in production code, but some bugs may exist and minimal error handling. I also no longer have a scanner to verify the output, so some testing is prudent. In addition, this only handles Code39 output, so if you need a different barcode method, you'll have to start from scratch.

---

<apex:component controller="code39" access="global">
    <apex:attribute assignTo="{!shouldCheckDigit}" type="boolean" name="checkDigit" default="false" description="True if should append additional check character." />
    <apex:attribute assignTo="{!sourceCodeValue}" type="string" name="codeValue" description="The string to encode." />
    <apex:stylesheet value="{!URLFOR($Resource.barcodeCSS)}"/>
    <div style="display: inline-block; border: 1px solid black; min-width: 1in; padding: 0.25in 1in;" >
        <div>
            <apex:repeat value="{!barCodeString}" var="bar">
                <apex:outputText value="" styleClass="{!if(bar='1','blackbar','whitebar')}" />
            </apex:repeat>
        </div>
        <div style="text-align: center">
            {!sourceCodeValue}
        </div>
    </div>
</apex:component>

---

public class code39 {
    public Boolean shouldCheckDigit { get; set; }
    public String sourceCodeValue { get; set; }
    
    static String keys = '0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ-. $/+%*';
    static String[] values = new String[] {
        '1010001110111010', '1110100010101110', '1011100010101110', '1110111000101010',
        '1010001110101110', '1110100011101010', '1011100011101010', '1010001011101110',
        '1110100010111010', '1011100010111010', '1110101000101110', '1011101000101110',
        '1110111010001010', '1010111000101110', '1110101110001010', '1011101110001010',
        '1010100011101110', '1110101000111010', '1011101000111010', '1010111000111010',
        '1110101010001110', '1011101010001110', '1110111010100010', '1010111010001110',
        '1110101110100010', '1011101110100010', '1010101110001110', '1110101011100010',
        '1011101011100010', '1010111011100010', '1110001010101110', '1000111010101110',
        '1110001110101010', '1000101110101110', '1110001011101010', '1000111011101010',
        '1000101011101110', '1110001010111010', '1000111010111010', '1000100010001010',
        '1000100010100010', '1000101000100010', '1010001000100010', '1000101110111010' };
    
    public String[] getBarCodeString() {
        return generateCode39(sourceCodeValue, shouldCheckDigit).split('');
    }
    
    public String getBarCodeSource() {
        return generateCode39(sourceCodeValue, shouldCheckDigit);
    }
    
    String generateCode39(String source, Boolean checkDigit) {
        String[] result = new String[0];
        Integer index, total = 0;
        Integer[] keyValues = new Integer[0];
        source = source == null? '': source;
        result.add(values[keys.indexOf('*')]);
        for(String sourceChar: source.toUpperCase().split('')) {
            if((index = keys.indexOf(sourceChar)) > -1) {
                result.add(values[index]);
                total += index;
            }
        }
        if(checkDigit) {
            result.add(values[Math.mod(total, 43)]);
        }
        result.add(values[keys.indexOf('*')]);
        return String.join(result,'');
    }
}

---

barcodeCSS (Static Resource)

.blackbar, .whitebar {
    display: inline-block;
    overflow: hidden;
    padding: 0;
    width: 1px;
    height: 1cm;
}
.blackbar {
    background-color: black;
}
.whitebar {
    background-color: white;
}

Also, no unit tests for this, as it was a prototype. However, it should be functional for basic use cases, including embedding in a PDF.