PRIMA 2e User Manual

 
Some applications require different encodings, depending on the layout of the card, but use one 
chip type. 
 
Plugins can be developed to support multiple encoding styles, definitions, formats, and all in 
combination. 
 
In order to understand what "Format Templates" do, let's have a look at the following example. 
 
 
 

 
Keep in mind that there are several ways to achieve this, depending on the plugin and the 
requirement specification!!! 
 
This is only an example demonstrating how a sophisticated plugin *could* handle the 
case. This does not work with all plugins and it requires the plugin to contain support for 
Format Templates! 
 

 
 
Assume we have two cards with different layouts: 
 
The first one is a guest card that should contain only a sequential serial number, which must be 
written to sector 0 using the key "1234", has 10 digits and should be filled with leading zeroes. We 
call it the "SeqSerNumber". 
 
The second card is an employee card that should contain the employee number, which must be 
written to sector 0 using the same key as the guest card, and the first and last name of the 
employee, along with his birth date, which must be written to sector 1 using a highly secure key. 
The field names (and lengths) are "EmployeeNo" (10) and "Firstname" (20), "Lastname" (20), 
"BDate" (YY-MM-DD). 
 
Using the same chip cards for both layouts allows using the same plugin, just with different 
"definitions" on what and how to encode. 
 
For the two different encoding requirements, we would create two "Format Templates".  Each of 
them contains the description of each request, so Format Template 1 would contain the following 
definition: 
 
Format Template "Guest" 
Fieldname Sector 

SeqSerNum 0 

1234 

10  0 

Num 

 
and Format Template 2 would contain the definition: 
 
Format Template "Employee" 
Fieldname Sector 

EmployeeNo  

0 

1234 

10 

leading 0 

Num 

Firstname 1  scrambled-high-secure-key 

20 trailing 

spaces Text 

Lastname 1  scrambled-high-secure-key 

20 trailing 

spaces Text 

BDate 1 

scrambled-high-secure-key 

- - 

Date 
(yy-mm-dd)