Required Technical Assistance To Connect GRPS POS Terminal Machine With Vb.net

[accmaster]

Hello everyone,

I have developed a Point of sale software for petrol station, this is a automated software directly connect to dispensers.
My client want to issue a debit card to their customers so that they can charge on every filling.

He want to connect POS software with GPRS Pos terminal so that when the card is swiped a transaction should automatically saved in database with date, time, card no and amount in database.

Right now I have a local machine with POS software, after completion of filling from fuel dispenser data automatically saved in sql database. Here i have created an option to enter account number, vehicle number after completion of filling.

Now they want a separate server (on any remote station) so that all of their petrol stations can connect and save their transactions on one server so that they can get actual card balance.

My question is:

1. How to connect GPRS POS Terminal with VB.net?
2. When the card is swipe how to connect GPRS device to remote server application?
3. How to return values from remote application to GPRS terminal.


If anyone have idea please help me out

Thanks
Ladak

[sapator]

Hello.
If I understand correctly, you need to a access a GPRS Device and get the data.
This looks similar to what we have here, that we connect to a bank POS device and collect the data.And another case is using a printer dll to work the printer out.
Roughly, it all comes down to the POS device developer - provider to give you a dll that you can import to your code and trigger it's commands.
Here there is, usually a problem with POS devices. They do not have a native .net dll and is usually a C C++ dll as it needs to communicate with hardware parts and this is usually done in those languages.
If that is the case, in order to expose the methods of the DLL you would need to use API calls (there is whole section in the forums here) to import and call the dll methods.
You would need the developer to give you a document with the call you can generate.
The bank POS has about 500 pages for the dll usage but I guess a simple GPRS POS won't be that complicated.

If you are lucky enough to have a .net dll then you will import it and issue the commands.
If you do not have access to documentation then you need to check the exposed methods and experiment. Be advised that C++ dll's may use different variation of types (like long = int32 etc) and you need to provide in and out methods for the dll calls.

[Sitten Spynne]

These answers will be different for almost every device. Whether or not a device works with VB .NET will be different for every device. The best source of information will be the manual, or the vendor. If neither of those are present, you can't really do your job.