Due to the nature of working in a supermarket produce department, I have encountered many instances where needing to know the PLU code (or price lookup code) was important. However, information for that is not readily available in many cases, and there was opportunity for me – a budding developer – to turn lemons into lemonade; to build an app that could tell you the code for said lemons, and all you had to do with type in the item’s name. And an app that would work just as well on a desktop or mobile screen.
But why stop there? Oftentimes, you don’t just need a single PLU code, but many, as signage needs to be frequently changed or replaced. If you had to look up an item’s code for a list, why should a user need to hold a mobile device in one hand, and write down the code to a list with another hand? To make it easier to make a list of codes, I created a method with which to add the looked-up PLU codes to a list, which could then be stored until the user requested a full listing of items. This list appears upon user request when they are ready to create the signs at the in-store computer workstation, and then disappears from memory once the user closes the list or navigates away from the page to ensure excess data doesn’t accumulate, and that extra signs are not made unnecessarily.
This project was built in March of 2020 and currently gets data from JavaScript Objects. A future version of this project incorporates this data into a far larger project with far more data and new ways to store data. Stay tuned for that one!