Question

I want to implement a paperless filing system and was looking to use WIA with C# for the image acquisition. There are quite a few sample projects on CodeProject, etc. However, after downloading every one of them that I can find, I have run into a problem.

In each and every one of them, the reference to WIALib is broken. When I go to add ‘Microsoft Windows Image Acquisition’ as a reference, the only version available on my development workstation (also the machine that will run this) is 2.0.

Unfortunately, every one of these sample projects appear to have been coded against 1.x. The reference goes in as ‘WIA’ instead of ‘WIALib’. I took a shot, just changing the namespace import, but clearly the API is drastically different.

Is there any information on either implementing v2.0 or on upgrading one of these existing sample projects out there?

Answer 1

To access WIA, you’ll need to add a reference to the COM library, ‘Microsoft Windows Image Acquisition Library v2.0’ (wiaaut.dll). add a ‘using WIA;’

const string wiaFormatJPEG = '{B96B3CAE-0728-11D3-9D7B-0000F81EF32E}'; CommonDialogClass wiaDiag = new CommonDialogClass(); WIA.ImageFile wiaImage = null;  wiaImage = wiaDiag.ShowAcquireImage(         WiaDeviceType.UnspecifiedDeviceType,          WiaImageIntent.GrayscaleIntent,          WiaImageBias.MaximizeQuality,          wiaFormatJPEG, true, true, false);  WIA.Vector vector = wiaImage.FileData; 

(System.Drawing)

Image i = Image.FromStream(new MemoryStream((byte[])vector.get_BinaryData())); i.Save(filename) 

Thats a basic way, works with my flatbed/doc feeder. If you need more than one document/page at a time though, there is probably a better way to do it (from what I could see, this only handles one image at a time, although I’m not entirely sure). While it is a WIA v1 doc, Scott Hanselman’s Coding4Fun article on WIA does contain some more info on how to do it for multiple pages, I think (I’m yet to go further than that myself)

If its for a paperless office system, you might want also check out MODI (Office Document Imaging) to do all the OCR for you.