Manage admission visitors eventPoster Pass

[lightiverson]

After having generated an iOS 18 eventPoster pass. What's a good way to manage the admission for an event visitor using the pass?

According to Apple docs barcodes/qr-codes objects are not available for this type of pass. This would be an easy solution to scan a pass for admission.

Does anyone know if having the NFC entitlement is enough to develop an iOS app that can read an eventPoster's NFC data?

Ps. Moved this question from the main iOS 18 issue. Apologies for sending out notifications to people who don't care about this issue.

[alexandercerutti]

Just to clarify, you want to use an iPhone to read passes from other iPhones? I don't know if this is possible, I don't know how NFC API works for iOS.

NFC is made to be a better alternative to barcodes in some situations, but I guess it is up to Apple.

If you'd rather have barcodes on the front, you should opt-out posters layout and get back to the old layout.

[lightiverson]

Yeah. The current process is; a visitor shows a QR-code -> we scan it with an iOS app -> the iOS app updates the status of the code in the database to "scanned" -> and the visitor gets in.

And now we're switching to the eventPoster pass because of all the nice semantic features. But I wasn't expecting to have to get rid of qr-codes. So now we have to come up with a way to handle this part of the process. And I thought, since you have a lot of experience with creating NFC passes you may have some reading them.

But I'll do more research into NFC readers, see what comes up.

Thank you for all the work you put into this project.

[alexandercerutti]

I have experience in creating the passes, but sadly not in reading them and creating iOS Apps.
I hope someone else will be able to answer you! I'm going to ask people, if anyone knows.

This thread might be interesting to you: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57416444/how-can-i-read-the-nfc-content-from-apple-membership-passes

However, I'm not sure this applies to you.

[alexandercerutti]

I've been explained, that iOS have two different APIs for reading NFC contents. One is NFCTagReaderSession, and the other one is NFCVasReaderSession.

One of the difference between the two is that the second one allows opening automatically Apple Wallet for some kind of operations, while the first doesn't.

Furthermore, I could guess that the second might give access to further details, but I'm not sure about that, as I never used NFC and/or VAS.

By the way, as I'm not sure which are your exact requirements and if you have access to VAS documentation, I suggest you to have a confrontation with Apple about this specific topic. They'll for sure be able to give you better details about this.

Then, if such details are not under NDA, if you could share them here (or with me privately), it would be great! :)

Hope this helps!

[lightiverson]

Thanks. The thread is useful. And we'll contact Apple about this.

[lightiverson]

A small update since we last discussed this. It seems the barcode object does work with the iOS18 pass. I takes a few extra taps to get there but still, it's very usefull.

[alexandercerutti]

Yes, it gets placed in the backFields

[lightiverson]

Hi @alexandercerutti, by any chance have you managed to get silenceRequested working?

We've been following this documentation. But haven't been able to get the system to suggest do not disturb. We have the live activity working, which gives the idea that the system is correctly aware of the starttime/relevanttime/endtime.

Let me know if you would like me to start a new discussion because of the different subject of this question.

[alexandercerutti]

Hey, I honestly never tried. I think the silenceRequested should make appear a Siri suggestion on the iPhone, but I'm not sure. Did you set the eventType to PKEventTypeMovie?

[lightiverson]

Ah to bad. Yeah reading the docs, I expect the Siri suggestion as well. We've tried some variations of:

"semantics": {
    "eventType": "PKEventTypeMovie",
    "silenceRequested": true,
    "eventName": "Animated Movie",
    "eventStartDate": "1995-11-22T19:00-08:00",
    "eventEndDate": "1995-11-22T20:21-08:00",
    "venueName": "Steve Jobs Theater",
    "venueLocation": {
        "latitude": 37.330886,
        "longitude": -122.007427
    },
}

So far I've tried it with a real iPhone. I'm going to try it with the simulator. Perhaps the logs have something to offer.

Thanks anyways!

[alexandercerutti]

Did you inspect the pass to check if the property is still there? Just to exclude any problem with passkit-generator.

[lightiverson]

Yeah kind of, I'm doing all the steps manually in the spirit of a proof of concept. To see if the silenceRequested works at all.

So, it's not a problem with passkit-generator. And the property is definitely in there.

[alexandercerutti]

If you have a sample pass to download, I can try to check if I see it.
Btw, I think the suggestion appears in a timeframe included in eventStartDate and eventEndDate.