Hello,

I have a question about how to take a message instance, serialize it (via to_b or to_s) and then, read that back into a message via Message.parse.

So, for the following message:

require 'iso8583'

module ISO8583

class Ums_Message < Message
mti_format N, :length => 4
mti 1100, "Authorization Request Acquirer Gateway"

bmp  2, "Primary Account Number (PAN)",               LLVAR_N,   :max    => 19
bmp  3, "Processing Code",                            N,         :length =>  6

bmp_alias  2, :pan
bmp_alias  3, :proc_code

end

end

I run this code and it breaks with the error message at the bottom. What am I doing wrong?

mes = ISO8583::Ums_Message.new("Reversal Advice Repeat Acquirer Gateway")
mes[2] = 1234567890123456789
mes["Processing Code"] = "123456"

outbound_msg_str = mes.to_s #serialize to a string
outbound_msg = ISO8583::Ums_Message.new("Reversal Advice Repeat Acquirer Gateway") #create new message instance
outbound_msg = ISO8583::Ums_Message.parse outbound_msg_str #de-serialize into new instance

ISO8583::ISO8583Exception: MTI: 0 not allowed!

Just got to my first test message class. After sending in some initial values, and using the to_b method to see the result, i'm seeing a bunch of "\u" texts in the beginning. Do you know why this is happening or help explain what is going on and what I can do to remove this?

    class Message < ISO8583::Message
      mti_format ISO8583::N, :length => 4
      mti 0100, "Authorisation Request"


      bmp 2, "Primary Account Number (PAN)", ISO8583::LLVAR_N, :max => 19
      bmp 3, "Processing Code", ISO8583::N, :length => 4
      bmp_alias 2, :pan
    end

      message = Iso::Omnipay::Message.new 0100
      message[2] = '4242424242424242'
      message[3] = '0001'
      message.to_b #0064`\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000\u00001642424242424242420001

Hi Tim,

It looks like some of the issues I've been seeing with parsing ANS fields are related String encoding in Ruby >= 1.9 (I know the current code base only supports ruby 1.8 but I'm tied to some other libraries which don't support < 1.9).

I've been trying to recreate the issues I've seen with a test file and I've run into other encoding issues with test files. Explicitly setting file encoding to US-ASCII seems to fix most failures in the test suite (except for EBCDIC conversion).

I was wondering what your thoughts how best to properly update things for >= 1.9
I considered updating everything to assume UTF-8 and then converting to US-ASCII, etc where needed. Does this sound sensible?

Ruby's new built in encodings don't seem to cover EBCDIC. iconv is still available as a gem but the code comments in util.rb suggest that it's not reliable on every platform.

Please let me know if I can do anything to help.

Cheers,
Sean.

Hi there,
this issue is a mixture of a proposal, issue and a question :).
If communicating via TCP Socket (if you are required to use the shitty iso8583 protocol you probably are) you will often be required to submit the iso8583 message, along with the LLP header (length of the message in network byte order). I tried implementing it, however I'm never able to calculate it properly. Therefore my questions are:

1. Do you plan on implementing something like this generically in the gem?
2. Can you provide a little assistance with my own approach for this? I would be happy to create a PR for this, if you want it to be included in the gem, once it is working properly..
   I currently have something like this within the ISO8583::Message class:
   binary representation of the message, prefixed with the length of the message, presented with 2 bytes.

def stream
  message = to_b
  header = sprintf('%02d', message.length)
  header + message
end

Do you have an idea what would be the best way to approach this? I have to admit the internals of the iso8583 gem are not 100% familiar to me, maybe there is something relatively easy that can be changed, however I could not find it.

Hi,

How could I add headers (H1 to H14) into the message? Is there a way to use the existing code or would it need some new code to support header fields?

Basically the message I would need to build should have structure like this:
MTI
Bitmap, Primary
Bitmap, Secondary
Bitmap, Third
H1
...
H14
2
...
127.L3

any plans to add in rules for parsing subfields of a bm?

/ruby/2.4.0/gems/iso8583-0.2.2/lib/iso8583/field.rb:70: warning: constant ::Fixnum is deprecated
/ruby/2.4.0/gems/iso8583-0.2.2/lib/iso8583/field.rb:22: warning: constant ::Fixnum is deprecated

Thank you for providing the iso8583 Ruby Gem. I've begun to explore its usage ... and in my scenario, I need to send a 'message header' to the service I'm consuming (using a TCP/IP Socket). The first field in the header is the message length.

My questions:

1. How can I get a message length for a message?

2. How can I use the iso8583 code to create the header?

Sincerely,

Douglas Birch