User Guide

MagTek Device Drivers for Windows

COMMANDS

Like properties, commands are identified by a string name and have string arguments. All

commands are terminated by line feed <LF> or a carriage return. To invoke a command, an

application simply writes it to the driver in the same manner as writing to a file or serial port. If

the command has a response defined for it, the application reads it from the driver using the same

I/O handle as in the write.

Four types of commands are defined by the device control language:

• Non-interactive – These commands manipulate the device without requiring any

interaction with the user. The property commands

get and set, reset and ver are

examples of this type.

• Interactive – These commands interact with the user. They do not necessarily require the

user to do anything but may only prompt the user to do something.

display is an

example of such a command. Others, such as read or write, however, require user

interaction to complete. For example, the user must either swipe a card or cancel the

operation in order to complete a read command.

• Device-specific – These commands give access to device-specific features. For example,

the

load_key command is available for MagTek devices that use keys to encrypt data

before sending it to the host.

• Raw – These are effectively escape commands. They allow the application to bypass the

driver to perform device-specific operations that are not included in the driver syntax and

not supported elsewhere. With these commands, an application has no limitations on the

amount of control it has over a device. The raw commands can be formatted exactly as

specified in the device documentation. The command bracketing will be inserted by the

driver if required (e.g., <stx> and <etx> will be inserted for certain devices). Three

commands are defined for this type:

rawsend and rawrecv, used to send and receive

data directly to the device, and

rawxact, a transactional version that is a combination of

the first two.

A small set of interactive and non-interactive commands is all that is required for an application

to perform the most common tasks with these devices. Device-specific or raw commands should

rarely ever be needed.