POS Cash Drawer with Internet Explorer?

S

Scott A. Keen

Hi,

I'm getting tasked with writing an ASP application deployed throughout the
company's intranet where all the workstations will be running Internet
Explorer 6.0.

It's a retail business, and some of the workstations are Point-Of-Sale and
will need to have cash drawers and bar-code scanners.

The project managers want this as a web-application because of the ease of
deployment and updates to the other stores. The problem is, I don't know how
to activate the cash drawers from within IE. Is there any kind of ActiveX
control which can be plugged into IE to allow control over the cash drawer
from within IE? We don't have the cash drawers purchased yet, and are
waiting to find out if anyone makes an ActiveX plug-in control and cash
drawer which will work from IE.

Suggestions and recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Scott
 
C

Chris Barber

Reliability would be horrible.

Who the heck thought that one up? Let me know what brand the stores are - I
reckon I could have a big shopping spree coming up!

You would probably need a custom written browser add-in to be able to do
anything (unless you run it as a .htc and you could then instantiate local
side DLL's to do the work). But .... how to get the DLL's to the client
machines and get them installed - oh the fun we could have messing with
that!

Chris.
 
C

Chris Barber

.... PDAs ... good point.

Cheers,

Chris.

Tom B said:
Not much point in using PDA's as Cash Drawers were specifically mentioned.

Everything else I agree with. I'm sure you could write a bunch of ActiveX
controls to be downloaded and installed on the IE client. But you're
probably better off writing an actual application anyway.





to
 
T

Tom B

To control the cash drawer and bar code scanner you'll have to lower the
security settings on the browser, and have Activex components control them.
You could use Citrix like Ray suggested, but I suspect that would be pricey
and has a little bit of upfront configuration.

If you wrote a fat client application, that gets updated automatically by a
server, you could have the best of both worlds.

Just my opinion.
If your committed to using IE, then you'll just have to bear in mind the
limitations that are there, and be sure to code around them.
 
J

Jeff Cochran

It's a retail business, and some of the workstations are Point-Of-Sale and
will need to have cash drawers and bar-code scanners.

Okay, here's where you're thinking too hard. :)

Bar code scanners usually are a keyboard wedge type. That means
anything read by the scanner is simply input the same as if a user
typed the characters at a keyboard. There's nothing at all special
about the bar code scanners in terms of IE or your app.

Cash drawers are also pretty simple. It's usually triggered by a
command over a serial or parallel port similar to printing. All it
does is release a latch on the cash drawer, a spring pushes the drawer
out. Again nothing specific to IE or your app, though you might need
a control in your app to send the command signal or trigger the
utility that comes with your cash drawer.

Call the supplier of your POS hardware and ask for programming specs.
Tell them what you're doing, they will provide the code to do it.

Jeff
 

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