Xamarin Forms Device Based NFC Loyalty Card

Question

Hey Everybody,

Does anybody have an examples or point me into the right direction on looking at extensions of nugets that help with creating a NFC loyalty card in my app which literally has the customer ID on it.

I have seen samples for writing to physical NFC Tags or reading them but I want to create a new loyalty page on my app that every customer has a digital loyalty card on which just holds their customer id digits and when presented to an NFC reader at the shop it just sends the customer ID to the reader to display just like the Apple Wallet, Ideally I don't want the customers to use physical tags or stickers just the device.

Answer 1

Hi @Joey Ireland

I think the first thing to do is to determine the structure of the data that you would want to read, or to write, depending upon your business rules. Will the data be open, or will it be encrypted, so that when you read it, you decrypt it first?

As your question stands, it is really just asking how to read text from a NFC source, and there are plenty of examples around that show how to read or write text.

Often the data might just be a guid, in which your app would pass the guid to a server, which would look it up, and then return the data that the guid represents.

Or it could be a json string that has been converted to Base64 for ease of transport, which you would just need to convert from Base64 to the original.

Or it might be data that is encrypted.

Once you are certain about your architecture, and the structure of info that you want passed around, the NFC component is not much more than just a read-write endpoint.