Text Issues with a IDTech Magnetic Swipe

Classic Servoy
1

We have a solution where a fair amount of our customers use a magnetic swiper to process credit cards.

We have a very weird issue that I wondered if any Java and/or Servoy guru’s have either encountered, OR have an idea of what might be the issue.

The client has 3 workstations running the same servoy solution from the same server. All workstations have a mag swipe to use for running credit cards. All mag swipers are programmed the same.

On the trouble client, when they swipe a credit card, the string that ends up in the servoy global variable field does not match the string on the card. We know this because if we pull up wordpad on the same computer and use the same swiper to scan the same card, we get a different string.

We’re thoroughly confused as to what is going on. Our servoy program is NOT modifying the string, as the other 2 workstations work fine.

All we can think is that there’s some issue with the swiper and Java. (Again, the swiper will swipe correctly in a different program on the same computer.)

We’re on 1.6.0_21 of Java and 4.1.6 of Servoy.

Anyone have any possible clues?

2

Update. So we changed the LAF to Windows from default, and it did change how the string was read, but it still changed various characters in the magstripe.

So for whatever reason, on this workstation, Java / Servoy / our solution is encoding the string differently than in other programs on the computer.

I’m stumped. :)

3

Hearing you speaking about wordpad, I assume your workstations are windows based.
Are the OS/versions the same on all workstations? For example have they all been installed from the same language CD of windows?

I would especially check for the Locale of windows (Regional and Language Options control panel / Language toolbar), since this can affect the way Java will treat the input, maybe even the keyboard setting, if you swipe card’s is somehow ‘faking’ keyboard events to enter the data.