NFC is a neat technology.
If you’ve got an NFC sensor on your phone or tablet then there is a reasonable chance you’ve played around with apps like Trigger, which perform various actions on your device when you wave it over NFC tags in stickers or on key fobs etc. after a bit of setup.
So, for example, you could have an NFC sticker by the front door that has been coded by Trigger to turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. With a variety of of NFC tags around and about you can set up your phone how you need it when you need it by a simple wave, avoiding a whole lot of fiddling about in the device settings.
Anyway, that’s one application of NFC tags. There are, of course, plenty more.
Indeed there have been a good number of questions in various forums asking how to get programmable NFC support in Delphi. Of course NFC is not currently “wrapped up” by Delphi’s RTL so up until now it’s been in the hands of the “creative”.
NFC tag scanning support in Android falls into 2 areas:
- You install an app that advertises that it can respond to some NFC tag content. When the device is waved against such a tag the app can be automatically launched. If more than 1 app is registered Android will initially launch a chooser dialog to allow the user to pick the app they require.
Actually this support is easy enough to do in Delphi so long as you can locate a suitable import unit or two containing the required Android APIs for NFC. - You run an app that permits the user to scan NFC tags while it is in the foreground and it directly responds to any scanned tags.
This seems to be more commonly required in commercial applications and alas is much more difficult to achieve with Delphi. It falls into the category of problem that requires some Java smarts and some command prompt hackery to achieve.
Bummer.
Anyway, I was recently looking into writing some NFC support, given the frequency of questions being asked. Part way through my research I discovered that Daniel Magin was simultaneously trying to do the same thing, primarily for a talk at Delphi Tage.
I helped Daniel out with the Java callback and command-line building trickery – that seems to be an area where I can readily add value to Android low level chicanery – and he helped me out overcoming a nasty crash bug with Java arrays of NFC data records not being surfaced correctly by the Delphi RTL.
In the end we both had some sample apps that permit NFC scanning and also, just as an added bonus, NFC writing!
You can find my solutions written up in quite some detail here:
Daniel’s efforts will also be made available very soon.
Enjoy coding up your NFC apps, everyone!