Remote Desktop Mobile mangles barcodes coming from scanner

Posted by sfonck on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by sfonck
Published on 2010-03-25T14:14:56Z Indexed on 2012/04/15 5:35 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 753

We have an application here using handhelds to scan barcodes. These handhelds are actually making a remote desktop session towards a server where the application runs. Works fine.

Now we have bought some new Motorola MC55's running 'Windows Mobile 6.1 Classic', and when using the application over remote desktop: it mangles the characters of the barcodes....

I already tried following things:

  • When scanning a barcode on the MC55 itself it is displayed correctly
  • When scanning a barcode via the remote desktop into a notepad session it is incorrect.
  • Played with all options of the 'Remote Desktop Mobile' - no result
  • Disabled 'autocorrect' and 'suggest words when entering text' on the input settings - no result

The strange things is:

  • a barcode which consists of only numbers gets scanned correctly
  • the mangled characters comes through in lower case
  • For some codes \t is mangled in between (should normally be entered after the barcode)

    e.g.:

  • 'PERIN4' becomes 'ERINp4'

  • 'MGZB' becomes 'GZB m'
  • 'BAK664' becomes 'AK664 b'
  • 'MAGBFA01' becomes 'AGBFmA01'
  • '5021879949500' gets scanned correctly

Final solution:

Suppllier of the handhelds said the handheld was sending the characters too fast over the remote desktop connection.

They changed the handheld to wait for 50ms between sending each character, which produced correct results right now.

Scanning a barcode became somewhat slower but it's almost not remarkable to endusers.

© Server Fault or respective owner

Related posts about remote-desktop

Related posts about rdp