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This is almost an EXACT reoccurrence of problem that was in iOS 8 and finally fixed in iOS 8.3. That problem was documented here : iOS8 and Safari no longer working with Bluetooth scanner

What's happening is using a bluetooth barcode scanner. Scanning into a web application produces inconsistent results. Sometimes more characters sometimes less. In the previous iOS 8 issue the problem was only in Safari. This time it's worse because the problem is now in both Safari AND Chrome. So there's no backup browser this time. Scanning into a non web browser app like Email or Notes works EVERY TIME. It's just the web browsers for some reason.

Does anyone have more info on this? Is there a fix some how? If not is there a good precedure for downgrading assuming Apple hasn't stopped signing the old iOS 9 yet? I'm sure that's going to happen any day.

Any information would be appreciated. This is a major problem with our application.

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David Leedy
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  • We are experiencing the same issue on iPad when adding special characters (i.e CR, Tab) at the end of the read barcodes. They get randomly inserted in the middle of the barcode on Safari. It works perfectly on iOS 9.3.5 and iOS 10 applications except Safari (Notes, ...). If we remove those special characters the barcodes get printed just fine (no reordering of characters whatsoever), but this goes against the business logic of our application. Since this is definitely a bug from Safari we would also like to have more information on this. – Lionel C. Oct 05 '16 at 08:49

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I realize this is several months later but in case you still haven't figured out a work around or if someone else is in need here is what I was able to do to get it working adequately until it is fixed in iOS.

We had the same type of issue you describe, iOS 9 had no issues but iOS 10 would place a random length of the barcode into the field and split the remaining part to another field.

Note the below is tested on iPad 4 iOS 10.3.2 and your results may vary. This hasn't been tested thoroughly, only about 100 barcodes or so and mostly with the Koamtec since that is what was causing us the most trouble.

The scanners we use (Koamtac KDC400 and Symbol LS/LI-4278) both have a setting to slow down the transmission of the bar code data. When I set them to longer delays the barcodes come through fine.

For the KDC you are looking for "HID Character Delay = 50msec" (I find 100 is a good one too but it is very slow)

For Symbol LS/LI you want "HID Keyboard Keystroke Delay" / "Long Delay (40 msec).

For other brands/models there is a good chance the manual will have a similar code.

In your linked post you mention Opticon Scanners, I don't have any of those but taking a very quick glance at the manual it might be called "Intercharacter delay" for that brand.

If this works for you or if you came up with a different workaround I would love to hear it.

Jim Knecht
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  • Hi. Thanks for the comment. Yes I've seen where adding a millisecond delay between the characters has helped. It had to be pretty long and I think that we had a scanner that didn't go long enough. I kind of forget at the moment but it did help. I do occasionally hear from apple regarding the bug itself. So maybe there's still help they will fix it. Sadly we've replaced many iPads with Microsoft Surfaces due to this issue. – David Leedy Jun 20 '17 at 15:39