Data form Magnet Card Reader - How to get / use it?

Franz_man

New member
Joined
Sep 28, 2007
Messages
1
Programming Experience
Beginner
Hello,

the follwoing 2 challenges needs to be tackled/solved:

A customer enters a fitness studio and his customer card (magnet card) is pulled thru a magnet card reader.

Magnet card reader looks like this: http://www.tlsoftware.de/tl-software/magnetkartenleser.htm
As you can see the plug/interface is a simple keyboard addition.

The data on the magnet card is one number - lets say 6 digits - the membership number.

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Challenge 1:

How do I get this data into a textbox of a VB.NET form?

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Now the next step - Challenge 2:

The client on the PC should now send a request over the Internet to a web database (mysql) and should ask for all the related data of this member.
Which could a picture of the person, membership status, already checked in... aso.)
The data is send back and displayed in a form.

How could this be managed?

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A friend of mine will develope a solution for this in C++/GTK. For commercial reasons we cannot wait too long, but I still want to learn how to solve this in VB.NET.

Thanks a lot for any suggestions!
 
Buy a magstripe reader that works like a keyboard. Swiping the card makes the reader (connected to the keyboard port) "type" the characters it sees. You'll have to substring this.

2) Thats a very involved question. I dont recommend you use MySQL. Just because it's free doesnt means it costs nothing. Read the DW2 link in my signature to find out how to access data in a SQL Server or Oracle database. Read the Dw1 link to find out how we did it back in .NET 1.1 which is something youll have to do if you use MySQL (MySQL doesnt support the easy new methods, you need to be a pro programmer to get it working with them..*)
Compare DW1 and DW2; i can promsie you that DW1 is significantly more work and less "good" as a solution. In light of this, and speed of development, it makes SQLS or ORacle a cheap option. Note of course that both SQLS and Oracle have free versions.


*It may work with OLE for ODBC, come to think of it.)
 
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