Rfid

In order for the users to find objects more efficiently, one can mark UBIK^® objects with certain properties. Whenever a user scans a RFID tag with the UBIK^® client, the resulting ID value can be used to find all matching objects, namely objects that have the right property.

Introduction: RFID & NFC

NFC stands for "Near Field Communication" and is a set of ideas and technologies for data transfer between devices, typically in close distances. Technically, it is based on RFID ("Radio-Frequency Identification"), which describes specific technical solutions.

Amongst the use cases for NFC, there is communication between smartphones and other devices, but also the scanning of RFID tags.

The UBIK^® RFID scanning feature specifically is the ability to scan RFID tags in order to identify UBIK^® objects.

Supported RFID Tags

The client uses NDEF (NFC Data Exchange Format) for maximum compatibilty between NFC devices, tag types, and operating systems.

Supported Devices

When your client supports NFC, you can see this by opening the side menu. If NFC is supported, a button for enabling/disabling NFC is shown on the top.

Search modes

UBIK^® provides two modes for searching objects: online and offline.

Searching offline

In any case (regardless of the network connection and sync mode), UBIK^® always goes through all the objects currently available on the device and find the ones that match the scanned results.

Searching online

When the Internet is avaiable and UBIK^® is not running under offline mode, the search result is enhanced by online search. This means any objects that match the scanned results can be found even if they don't yet exist locally.

Search result

If the device is placed near an NFC Tag (and NFC is turned on), a search is triggered automatically. The side menu will open up and show the results. If there is exactly one result, the client automatically navigates to that object, if there are more results, the user can select the object out of the list.

Multiple codes on a single object

It's possible have multiple NFC/RFID codes on a single object. This allows the same object to be found when you scan any of those codes. For such objects, the general scan and potentially the search behaviors are exactly the same as those with only a single code. For example, if an object with multiple codes is found when you scan one of the codes, it could also get unlocked.

Scan to input mode

Instead of performing object searches for scan results, UBIK^® can also use the scan results as input for property value editing. In this so called scan to input mode, no searches are performed.

At the moment, there is no standard UI to control this mode. However, it can be easily customized. The two relevant properties are:

AppStatus.ToggleNfcScanToInput: Controls the scan to input mode. True to turn it on, false to turn it off so that it returns to the default scan to search mode. This value automatically resets to the default value false when a property edit session ends;
AppStatus.NfcScanToInputResult: The last NFC/RFID scan result while scan to input mode is on. This value gets automatically cleared when a property edit session ends.

Except on iOS, the scan to input mode doesn't override the overall NFC/RFID toggle (AppStatus.ToggleNFCScanning) which controls whether UBIK^® should scan NFC/RFID tags. It's different on iOS simply because scanning is performed in a session in general and gets turned off automatically after a scan.

Classifications

In order for objects to be identifiable through RFID, they have to carry the SYSCLS OBJECTWITHRFIDTAG classification.

The service query used for online searching is SYSCLS RFIDTAGSCANQUERY.