15" LCD Desktop Touchmonitors with Magnetic Swipe Reader (USB) User Guide 1525L
MagTek Device Drivers for Windows   
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•  Property names specified in format rules are 11 characters or less, consisting of alphabetic 
characters, digits, and ‘_’. The property name begins with an alphabetic character. 
•  Properties used in format strings do not conflict with properties defined by the driver. If 
there is a duplicate property (e.g., dev_version) specified in the format strings, the driver will 
return the value of the parsed property rather than the device version string. 
•  Magnetic stripe formats are comprised of the following types of fields. 
Format Code  – One or two characters specifying the format 
of the data to follow 
Field Separator  – Used to delimit fields of data 
Fixed-Size  – Data field which is fixed-length 
Variable-Size  – Data field which is variable-length and is 
terminated by a field separator 
Optional  – The data is either a fixed-size field or a field 
separator (if the field is not present) 
DESCRIPTION 
The MTD driver supports up to 8 different card formats. Each format consists of a name, a 
template, and a set of rules. There may be multiple rules for a single template, but there can only 
be one template per format name. The name identifies the format. The template provides a 
high-level format to which the data is to be compared so as to determine if the rules for the 
format in question should be applied. The rules are specific format strings that specify how to 
parse the data and the properties into which the parsed data is to be stored. 
When the driver applies a format, it will make that knowledge available to an application through 
a property which can be retrieved with the /get command. 
The driver may be parameterized with the formats via values in the device’s software key in the 
registry. The following REG_SZ registry values are supported where x is a number 1-8. 
fmtx_name   name for format 
fmtx_template  format template 
fmtx_rules   one or more comma-delimited rules 
When the driver receives data from the device, it attempts to match the incoming data to one of 
the templates. If a template matches, the driver attempts to parse the data using one of the rules 
corresponding to the matched template. It sequentially attempts to apply each rule in the order 
that it appears in the fmtx_rules property. If the driver cannot apply any of the rules, the driver 
attempts to match the data to the next template and apply its rules until it either successfully 
applies a rule or runs out of templates. 










