RFID: Radio frequency identification A method of identifying unique items using radio waves. Typically, a reader communicates with a tag, which holds digital information in a microchip. But there are chipless forms of RFID tags that use material to reflect back a portion of the radio waves beamed at them.
Form Authoring
XFA has the capability to handle barcodes since beginning. In Adobe LiveCycle ES1.0, we introduced the support for elementary RFIDs also. It is handle like any other barcode and named it rfid. The form author can put an rfid object on the label while designing label using Adobe LiveCycle Designer.
RFID set up in Adobe LiveCycle Output
To enable the rfid capability in Adobe LiveCycle Output service, first, the user needs to do rfid set-up based on the target rfid printer. The user has to configure the RFID parameters in the XDC file using Adobe LiveCycle XDC Editor, based on his rfid printer configuration before printing his first rfid label.
There are four device options in the XDC that one needs to configure.
rfidBlockRetries
It controls the number of times the printer attempts to write to a particular block of a single RFID tag. The accepted values for this option is between 0 to 10.
If the user doesn’t specify in its XDC, the printer will take the default value ’0′.
rfidLabelRetries
The number of labels that will be attempted in case of encode/write failure. This number is different from the rfidBlockRetries. The accepted values for this option is between 0 to 10.
If the user doesn’t specify in its XDC, the printer will take the default value ’3′.
rfidTagType
It controls the encoding type of the data in the RFID label. The RFID readers should have same tag type as the rfid printer has. The accepted values for this option varies printer to printer. Consult your printer manual for this. Generally this option takes values between 0 to 5.
| value | tag type |
|---|---|
| 0 | None |
| 1 | EPC Class 0 |
| 2 | EPC Class 0 Plus |
| 3 | EPC Class 1 64-bit |
| 4 | EPC Class 1 96-bit |
| 5 | ISO 18000-06B |
These tag types also has some frequency standards. In some countries, some of the frequencies are restricted and in that case the rfid printer might not support those corresponding tag types. In that case the printer will use the default tag type. There are number of other EPC and ISO standards.
rfidTransponderPosition
This is the distance of the microchip on the label from the top. The user needs to pass this value in dots. The accepted values are between 0 to length of the label.
If the microchip is located at the beginning of the label, the user needs to simply set this option to 0.
rfidDataType
This is the setting which will be specified based on the fact whether the data used is HEX or ASCII.
Here you go. Once the above set-up is taken care of, you can generate the labels using the generatePrintedOutput API of AdobeOutputService. You can upload the edited XDC file in the Adobe LiveCycle Repository and pass its uri as XDC URI in the API.
A quick disclaimer here that RFID capability is supported only for Zebra labels (zpl) and not in PS/PCL or pdf documents generated by Adobe LiveCycle Output.