Re: Card swipe without a display screen

"RPG400-L" <rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on 07/12/2017 04:56:04
AM:

----- Message from Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx> on Tue, 11 Jul
2017 16:44:50 -0500 -----

To:

RPG programming on the IBM i / System i <rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Subject:

Card swipe without a display screen

A card has a 111-character data strip on the back of the card. We can
not find an example, or figure out how to properly capture that data in
our RPG program. We can write a display file with a 111-char field
(CNTFLD 37) and successfully capture the data but none of us have ever
seen magnetic stripe data displayed on a POS terminal. Do others read
magnetic stripes? Is so, how?

One other thing. Depending on what you're using to actually process the
charge request, you may need to scan the swiped data for valid termination
strings and content of some of the fields. Sometimes cards don't swipe so
cleanly and we actually had our card processing software (a background
job) hang on an error for invalid data--specifically, the swipe presented
non-numeric data for the PAN (primary account number). We reported it to
the vendor, but to prevent further problems, I quickly wrote a procedure
to check the data for proper terminators and verify numeric data only in
the PAN.

Michael Quigley
Computer Services
The Way International
www.TheWay.org