We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.3 of our driver's license / ID card parsing library. Thanks to a great deal of helpful feedback from some of our initial clients, we've made dozens of changes and enhancements to improve ease-of-integration and simplicity of the interface.

Since our early adopter clients were in the process of evaluating our library for integration into their product line, this was a perfect opportunity to integrate their feedback into our own development cycle, and get these changes into place before "locking down" the interface to ensure future compatibility, and allow drop-in replacement of the DLL file for client upgrades. Going forward, enhancements to the parser will be directly compatible with the current interface and not require any code changes.

Broader Jurisdiction Support

During this process, we've expanded our testing database to include several more states, and also additional formats for states we had already tested.We also made a few enhancements to the parsing engine that not only accommodate some jurisdiction-specific deviations we have encountered, but that are likely to be applicable to future formats as well.

Simpler Is Better

We've simplified access to many properties to help minimize the code needed by developers to integrate our parser. One major change has been the replacement of exceptions to indicate invalid data for a particular element, to an enumerated constant or a shared property to represent an invalid value. This allows data to be processed and displayed with simpler If checks instead of more complex exception handling.

• Less coding logic to simply display values: nearly every property's .ToString method returns a string suitable for display that contains the value, or whether the value was not specified, or was invalid.
• Less coding logic to check for invalid or unspecified values: Most structures have an .Empty shared constant and an Invalid shared constant or enum to indicate unspecified or invalid data, meaning there are very few exceptions to be caught.
• Enhanced raw data recognition: More start sentinels are recognized for magnetic stripe data coming from a wider range of MSR devices, meaning less "massaging" the data before parsing.
• Greater usability:Interface members have been further optimized to be more productive. For example, the IsUnderAge method has been replaced with a more flexible Age property, indicating the person's years of age.

For More Information

Additional details can be found at the following pages:

• AAMVALib Overview
• Current state compatibility list

Feel free to contact us for any additional information, or to request a 30-day evaluation license to try the parser out yourself and see if it suits your needs.