Migrating to v6.0

This latest release represents a major update to the extension. The scanning algorithm has been completely rewritten to improve performance and accuracy. The aging ZBar SDK has been removed in favour of MLKit on Android and the Vision framework on iOS.

As part of the update we have improved the permission process and broadcast receiver usage to meet the updated android API 34 requirements.

Additionally we have implemented an asynchronous bitmap data scanning process which allows you to scan large images without blocking the main thread.

Overall this update should provide a much better experience for your users and improve the reliability of scanning barcodes in your applications.

Migration

APM

If you are using apm all you need to do is update to the latest build and regenerate your application descriptor. apm will handle the rest.

apm update 
apm generate app-descriptor

Manual

If you are manually managing your application descriptor (and manifest additions) then you will be required to make some changes to your manifest. Find the activity:

<activity 
    android:name="com.distriqt.extension.scanner.zbar.ZBarScannerActivity" 
    android:exported="false"/>

And replace it with:

<activity 
    android:name="com.distriqt.extension.scanner.mlkit.ScannerActivity" 
    android:exported="false" 
    android:theme="@style/ScannerActivityTheme" 
    android:configChanges="orientation|screenSize|screenLayout" />

Increase the minimum SDK version to 21:

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="21" android:targetSdkVersion="34"/>

New Algorithms

The new scanning algorithms are significantly different from the previous ZBar implementation. You may need to adjust your code to accommodate the new API and behavior. In particular the orientation of the scanned results is no longer available and will always be 'unknown'.

Android Gradle Version

We have updated the required gradle version used to build your application to be higher than the default AIR currently uses.

To specify a higher version add the following to your android node in your application descriptor:

<android>
    <gradleVersion>8.9</gradleVersion>
    <androidGradlePluginVersion>8.7.3</androidGradlePluginVersion>

  ...
</android>

If you don't do this you will see the following error when building your application:

Unexpected failure: Unable to run java: com.adobe.air.ADTException: gradle tool failed: 
FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

...

   > BUG! exception in phase 'semantic analysis' in source unit '_BuildScript_' Unsupported class file major version 65

note

June 2025: This is not currently automatically handled by apm so you will need to add this manually to your application descriptor.

We are working on an update to handle this.

Asynchronous Scanning

The new scanning process allows you to scan large images without blocking the main thread. This is particularly useful for applications that need to scan high-resolution images or perform other tasks while scanning.

Scanner.service.scanBitmapAsync(
    image.bitmapData,
    function ( scanResults:Vector.<ScanResult> ):void
    {
        // Handle the scan results
        for each ( var result:ScanResult in scanResults )
        {
            trace( "Code found: " + result.data );
        },
    function ( error:Error ):void
    {
        // process the error
    }
);