Suggestions for opening a cash drawer

JavaScript and client side scripting.

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esfisher
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Joined: Tue Oct 24, 2006 12:44 pm

Suggestions for opening a cash drawer

Post by esfisher »

Hi,

My company is currently in the process of re-writing our Point of Sale application. Currently, we have a desktop app written in VB.NET for walk-in purchases and an internet counterpart written in PHP (v5.0.4) so customers can do online shopping. We want to move to a fully web-based solution (either hosted on our servers or a server at their office). Our issue, however, is that we need to find a way to open the cash drawer when a sale is completed as well as when an authorized user clicks the 'Open cash drawer' button.

I've found information on using the exec() command to open a local batch file, but since the application will be installed on a server and accessed via the clients browser, I don't see how that would work.

We are also open to other non-php solutions, such as writing a browser plugin that adds a 'cash drawer' button, but we're not sure how to authenticate a user that way. We are also open to using a flash-based application to handle it, if we find that it is able to communicate to the drawer. Additionally, we could create a background service on the clients computer that we can communicate with to kick the drawer open.

The solution isn't limited to drawers that operate through printers, as some clients use drawers with a USB interface.

If anyone has any experience with web-based cash drawer solutions, I would greatly appreciate any assistance.

Thanks.
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onion2k
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Re: Suggestions for opening a cash drawer

Post by onion2k »

How about writing a .NET application that has an IE control (or Gecko) embedded in it. On the face of it it'd look and act just like a browser, but you'd have an environment that would also let you interact with the client PC however you want.

That said, it's been 10 years since I did any VB stuff, so I have no idea how complicated what I'm suggesting would be.
LSJason
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Re: Suggestions for opening a cash drawer

Post by LSJason »

One thing I could think of is sending the user to a ref:// URL (i.e. itpc://BLAH calls iTunes up when typed into the address bar in your browser), for which you would need a handler, which launches a program written in whatever language will do the job to open the drawer.
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Zoxive
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Re: Suggestions for opening a cash drawer

Post by Zoxive »

Something we did at my old job for scanners, was to have the server basically forward the command to the computers with the scanners (In your case the cash registers).

Only thing is we were running all on linux, which made it pretty simple with ssh.
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