Thread

I know this isn’t really related to code igniter but I’m pulling my hair out trying to find a solution to this and hope someone knows of a way to grab a card swipe from an id card and input it into my form. 
This is for a kiosk at a service station and they don’t want the mechanics to have to mess w/ a keyboard.  Anyways any help or a point in the right direction would be much appreciated.

By the sound of things you would have to write something in C/C++ like a little browser applet or something to handle it. I don’t see how php could help you in anyway.

As saying if your talking about using CI in a kiosk then you have a web browser on this thing? If so write a small program for when it gets the swipe card infomation to fill out a form just like google toolbar does.

I have no idea how you would write such a thing but its possible.

I know php can’t handle anything like this, but it seems that javascript would be able to somehow.

Another programmer back in college did something similar to this for a id swipe at the library, but i can’t remember if it was just javascript or if he had something else going on.

Don’t now if this would help just found it http://www.software-dungeon.co.uk/software.php?id=106511

Goes along the lines I was saying about an applet.

I’m not exactly sure how the swipe cards work but I did something similar to this for the base library when I was deployed to Kyrgyzstan 3 years ago.

The system was setup with a bar-code scanner that did nothing more than echo the numbers out to the computer. So, I just developed the website as normal and used some Javascript magic to place the cursor in the correct field and automatically submit after that field was completed (or upon other conditions, depending on the current form).

Worked like a charm.

yes, card and barcode scanners are nothing more than input devices, exactly like a keyboard

I agree with Michael Wales and jTaby. Use JavaScript to set the focus on the field you want the scan to go into. Use a scanner that inputs into the keyboard character stream. Use JavaScript to detect completion. This can be either by some characteristic of the barcode string (i.e. - length or recognizable ending character set). I’ve also seen some tricks with looking for elapsed time characteristics (i.e. - detect very quickly “typed” characters, which a human would not be able to do, then wait for a period of character inactivity).

-Jeff

Most barcode scanners allow you to simulate return so if its just one text field you would only need to make sure the field is being selected.

Javascript worked.  Thanks all for your replies an help.

-mh

Just out of curiosity, what model and manufacturer was the card scanner you used?