Originally Posted by
pbaldy
I've used both card swipe units and barcode scanners. In my experience both simply provide keyboard input. You put focus in a textbox and use the before/after update event(s) to handle the input. Both could be set to send a tab or enter at the end to trigger those events.
An easy way to test is to open Notepad on your computer and scan/swipe. That will show you what is being sent. I don't recall the brand of card swiper but it was a simple and relatively cheap one. We used Wasp scanners that seemed reliable. I've heard most brands are pretty reliable.