New GS1 Digital Link Tools Available

After the recent launch of the integration in the EVRYTHNG Platform for the GS1 Digital Link standard, we have made available some brand new tools to help developers test, generate, verify, and generally try out the GS1 Digital Link standard for themselves.

Generator

The generator page provides a UI for selection of all the required (and optional) GS1 Application Identifiers (AIs) and other parameters, and in turn outputs the final form of the GS1 Digital Link that contains all those data items.

The generator allows you to generate GS1 Digital Links for the example GS1 domain, an EVRYTHNG domain we offer, or your own domain. You can also choose whether to use the numeric-only or alphanumeric representations of AIs in the URL itself, as well as including any domain-specific data attributes that you require.

Finally, the generated GS1 Digital Link is shown in a visual form as a QR code. This is useful for testing attaching to packaging and scanning with a PoS scanner or a consumer smartphone.

Verifier

The verifier pages provides a simple UI for testing and validating an existing GS1 Digital Link. Simply input the URL on the left, and hit the button.

The results are generated using the apglib library, and include detailed parsing results for those interested. These are shown on the right hand side in a variety of different views:

• Results - an overview of the validation results. If the validation failed, you can see why.
• Stats - the validation statistics produced by the parser, detailing how much effort went into the parsing operations.
• Trace - A detailed trace of each step-by-step parsing operation that led to the end result, allowing you to see precisely why the input was deemed to be either valid or invalid.
• Grammar - View the many grammatical rules that determine the parser's verdict.

Lastly

The tools themselves are completely free and open-source, so you can study how the verifier works and make any tweaks you want to try out yourself.

For those who want to incorporate these capabilities in their own project, we will be working towards making these functionalities more accessible and usable with other projects via an SDK, so stay tuned!

If you want to learn more about what the GS1 Digital Link standard means for our developers, read the documentation, and start using the standard today for free.