BarTender and labels overview
BarTender, from Seagull Scientific, is the label design and printing product most Epicor sites use for shipping labels, material tags, part labels and anything else with a barcode on it. Epicor doesn’t print the label itself. It writes a small data file, and BarTender picks that file up, merges it into a label template and sends it to a printer.
Once you understand that hand-off, most setup questions and most “the label didn’t print” problems become a matter of working out which side of it has gone wrong.
How the integration works
Section titled “How the integration works”- A user (or a BPM) runs a report whose report style has the report type Bartender Labels.
- Epicor’s task agent gathers the report data and writes a
.btfile to the style’s output folder. - A BarTender integration running on a Windows server watches that folder. When a new
.btfile appears, it reads the file and prints the label. - The integration moves or renames the file so it isn’t printed twice.
The .bt file is plain text with two parts:
| Part | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Command header | A line wrapped in %BTW% … %END% that tells BarTender which template to open (/AF=), which printer to use (/PRN=) and how to read the data that follows |
| Data | A header row of field names, then one row per label record, taken from the report’s data definition |
Because the template path and the printer name travel inside the file, both must make sense from the BarTender server’s point of view, not from the Epicor server’s or the user’s PC.
Which reports can print labels
Section titled “Which reports can print labels”Epicor ships generic label reports that already have a BarTender style, each with its own report data definition:
| Report ID | Typical label |
|---|---|
GenShip |
Shipping and carton labels from a customer shipment |
GenInv |
Inventory and bin labels |
GenJob |
Job and material tags |
GenRcpt |
Receiving labels |
GenSO |
Sales order labels |
GenQA |
Inspection and quality labels |
Start from one of these rather than building from scratch. You can copy the style, point it at your own template, and extend a copy of its data definition if the label needs more fields.
Who supports what
Section titled “Who supports what”- Epicor supports the Epicor half: producing a correct
.btfile in the right place. - Seagull Scientific supports BarTender itself: installation, the integration service, templates, printer drivers and BarTender errors. Their support portal has guides, version history and licensing troubleshooting.
- If you bought BarTender through Epicor, Epicor manages the license file. Moving BarTender to a new server makes it fall back to a trial license, so request a new license file before you migrate.
Pages in this section
Section titled “Pages in this section”Setting up
- Integration Builder setup: the BarTender side, watching a
folder for
.btfiles - Report styles for BarTender: the Epicor side, where the file is written and which template it names
- Label templates and data fields: where to keep
.btwfiles, designing against real Epicor fields, multi-page labels
Automating
- Auto-print labels from a BPM: print on an event, and stage extra label data
Environments and fixes
- BarTender with Kinetic cloud and Linux: file share paths after the move to Linux containers
- Troubleshooting BarTender labels
Further reading
Section titled “Further reading”- EpiUsers: How to print from Epicor using BarTender
- EpiUsers: Insights 2024 REST API and BarTender, an alternative where BarTender pulls data from Epicor’s REST API instead of reading trigger files
Sources
This page is written in our own words. It was informed by: