Bwip-js and Cloudflare Workers - suggestion to include additional information to documentation

[m-muiznieks]

At first - thank you for your work.

I struggled to find a good solution for implementing the barcode and QR code in the Node.js environment. I thought I can forget about everything after finding this library unless I moved part of my project to the Cloudflare Workers environment.

Well.. nothing worked anymore.

It just threw issues, that .toBuffer is not a function and that's all.

In the process of trying to solve this issue, I found some other libraries, that somehow do the job, but there were other issues, most of them related to the same differences from the Node.js and Workers environment.

Here, I will paste my function (if anyone else is looking for the solution):

import bwipjs from 'bwip-js';
import { Buffer } from 'node:buffer';

interface CodeProps {
  codeType?: string;
  codeValue: string;
  barcodeHeightMm?: number;
  height?: number;
  width?: number;
  margin?: number;
  padding?: number;
  showText?: boolean;
  textXalign?: "center" | "offleft" | "left" | "right" | "offright" | "justify";
  textYalign?: "above" | "below" | "center";
  textColor?: string;
  barCodeColor?: string;
  backgroundColor?: string;
}

export const generateBarcodeSRC = async ({
  codeValue,
  codeType = 'code128',
  barcodeHeightMm = 15,
  showText = true,
  textXalign = "center",
  textYalign = "below",
  textColor = "#000000",
  barCodeColor = "#000000",
  backgroundColor = "#ffffff",
}: CodeProps) => {

  const options = {
    bcid: codeType,
    text: codeValue,
    scale: 3,
    height: barcodeHeightMm,
    includetext: showText,
    textxalign: textXalign,
    textyalign: textYalign,
    textcolor: textColor,
    barcolor: barCodeColor,
    backgroundcolor: backgroundColor,
  };

  try {
    // Generate the barcode buffer
    const buffer = bwipjs.toSVG(options);

    const svgBase64 = Buffer.from(buffer).toString('base64');
    const asString = `data:image/svg+xml;base64,${svgBase64}`;
    
    return asString;
    
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Error generating barcode:', error);
    return { error: JSON.stringify((error as Error).message), status: 500 };
  }
}

Everything worked before well unless it came to const buffer = bwipjs.toBuffer(options);, where the error appeared.
Instead, I changed it to const buffer = bwipjs.toSVG(options); to output just an SVG.

It's important, to include additional import { Buffer } from 'node:buffer'; at the top (see cloudflare documentation: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/runtime-apis/nodejs/), so this const svgBase64 = Buffer.from(buffer).toString('base64'); does not throw another error. :)

--

That's working for me.

For the authors - I wanted you to suggest including additional sentences about the Workers, as at one moment I had the feeling, that I was the only one who is dealing with that. At one place I just read the sentence "Well, just don't do this to workers, it's not for everything".

Again - Thank you. :)

[metafloor]

Did you look at the examples/threader.js code in the project? It demonstrates how to use with nodejs worker threads. Is there something about the cloudfare environment that is different than the standard node:worker_threads module?

Please tell me more about how you are creating the worker threads and communicating between the main thread and worker threads.