Reading from Access Card Systems

[bharanidharanit]

Is it possible to read data from Access Card Systems with php?

[kows]

that depends entirely on what software your "Access Card System" uses, as that's an incredibly generic term. please be more specific.

[bharanidharanit]

Thankyou,
I am making a eschool management. I want the students to login using access cards, so when they swipe the cards it must automatically add attendance to the database and to track the absence and presence of the students

[kows]

this would depend entirely on whatever software the card swipe used :/ it would be best to contact whatever company manufactured/supplied it.

[bharanidharanit]

Ya thankyou very much. So is it possible to do that?

[kows]

.. please re-read my post, because it seems you still don't understand. I have absolutely no clue if it would be possible to do what you're asking for; this is not really a question that has anything to do with PHP and has more to do with the flexibility of whatever card swipe system you might be using. thus, you really need to ask the manufacturer/supplier of the card swipes if something like that would be possible.

[penagate]

I don't think this is really a task for PHP. PHP might be used as a central back end of the system but the card reader would have to be attached to the front end and PHP would not be a suitable tool for that.

Essentially, a card as described is just an identification value. Swiping or reading the card in whatever manner inputs the value into the client machine. This can then be sent to a server which records attendance details (you can use PHP for this).

A barcode reader is very similar in that any given barcode simply represents a string. All the reader does is scan and interpret the barcode, and send to the PC as input. In essence it functions as a keyboard. A card reader might be more sophisticated or it might be the same, I do not know.

[dclamp]

Card readers take the magnetic strip and turn it into what ever was programmed on the card, a specific number within the system (in your case, this institution). I have never used card readers directly connected to computers, but thought its own network, connected to a master controller that logs the data.

Going off of what penagate said, if the card reader you are using is programmed like barcode readers to where it will read the code, send the number to the input, and press enter, then you are in business. Other wise you will need to find another way around this.

But this is not a PHP issue.

[I_Love_My_Vans]

There is no reason why PHP / HTML could not do this, so long as your input device spits out a number (like the others have said).

If you had a web page on a screen you could have the input box set to focus, use jQuery to check when the text box changes, when it changes fire the id to your PHP back end that checks the status of the swipe card id.

The returning value (true / false) can then be used to paint a massive "Access granted / denied", hell, feel free to throw in some sound effect for good measure :)

Workflow:

1) Swipe card / scan barcode
2) Text box is automatically populated with ID
3) jQuery sends AJAX request to your PHP back end with the ID
4) PHP checks this against the database
5) Returns success / failure message
6) jQuery displays a success / failure screen
7) Screen returns back to default after a few seconds

That said it's actually pretty easy :-)

[dclamp]

@Ilmv, he isn't looking for access control, only to use ID cards and a reader to track attendance in a class setting.

[I_Love_My_Vans]

Yes I know Dylan!

When displaying the success / failure message, just have "clocked in" or "clocked out", the message cold be whatever you want, it doesn't really matter, or detract from the fact that my solution is tah r0x0rs ;)