Some magnetic swipes are HID compliant. Those are the easiest to work with. Most will send an uncommon character first when the swipe is activated, like a carat or tilde, and you can use on key label to trap for it in your app and launch a form to display the data swiped or whatever you wish to do with it.

>>>>>We are looking for something to interface with our VFP8 application that will scan insurance cards and allow us to feed the results into our tables. Anyone use anything that they liked? Thanks!
>>>>
>>>>All you're really trying to do is read the magnetic strip on the back right?
>>>
>>>Not sure. We've done some preliminary inquiries online, but the question of the magnetic strip never came up. I assume so.
>>>
>>>Udate: This is one, but it doesn't say how it does it.
>>>
>>>"ScanSharp is designed to work with NetPractice. Simply scan patient insurance cards or driver’s licenses and ScanSharp does the rest. Special recognition software reads the scanned card and differentiates between names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, insurance details, etc. It then imports the information into the correct fields within NetPractice. Scanned images of the cards are also retained for quick reference."
>>>
>>>http://www.netpractice.com/scansharp.htm
>>
>>I wrote something in VFP 4 or 5 years ago that could get data from a magnetic strip on a card and also those handheld scanner things. The way those worked is when it read the strip on the card, or scanned a bar code with the handheld scanner, it simply read the info and sent the keyboard strokes to the keyboard - so it was really pretty easy.
>
>Ah, so then you just read the buffer. Interesting. We have a mtg/demo this afternoon, hopefully get more info then.