"Check-in" via a remote medium

[Christopher]

Hi guys!
You have a great plugin here with a lot of potential. Sure it’s been an interesting road so far, but I am getting there!
What I’d like to know is – as a non-dev, how difficult would it be to ‘check-in’ a client (you’re able to do it with a click of a mouse via your plugin, in the WP Dashboard manually) using something like a bar-code scanner?

What I’d like to do is create a QRCode from the order ID# and insert this into the confirmation email/ticket which they would bring with them, to gain entry.
To speed things up though – let’s face it searching for a person via the Dashboard is going to take too long if there are a hundred people standing outside in the rain haha – I’d like to have someone scan in the QRCode and verify that it’s a legit order and check them in.
While I realise that the QRcode generation bit is going to be my problem, I was wondering if there is a function / hook which I could use to achieve the same as ‘clicking’ via the Dash, with an imput into the DB (doesn’t even have to be WP related, just a manual change/hook from the web, presuming that the barcode reader has access to the WP DB.
I hope I’ve made sense?

[Barry]

Yes, that makes complete sense.

If your QR code allows you to work back to the attendee ID then on our side all you would really need to do is something like this (where $id is the attendee ID):

TribeWooTickets::get_instance()->checkin( $id );

Does that help at all? If you inspect the code in question you can see it is a fairly simple operation that updates an entry in the post meta table – so strictly speaking you wouldn’t even have to bootstrap WordPress to do this, though that would arguably make it easier.

[Christopher]

Thanks Barry!
That does make (sort of – will require some googling to understand where to put that code / what to do with it haha) sense.
Can you explain to me how the attendee ID is generated and where it is stored in the DB? Is the attendee ID unique to that specific ticket / event? Because ideally, my users will be coming back time and time again to attend different events (ie buy different ticket).

[Barry]

Sure, so, the name attendee might be a little misleading but in this context really represents an individual (could be anyone, they aren’t bound to a specific user) attending an event.

There is a 1:1 relationship between attendee objects and tickets – if you sell 45 tickets for example there will be 45 corresponding entries in the attendee list. These are stored as a custom post type and so the attendee object ID is simply a post ID.

I hope that clarifies things a little – but realistically I’d imagine you’re probably going to have to spend some time working with and looking through the code to build a complete picture of what’s happening – as I’m afraid there’s not too much more assistance we can provide for a custom project like this one.

I wish you luck however – and it would be great to see what you come up with 🙂

[Author]

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