NScan ticket_msg Ticket number not found

Over the last year or two we have seen this come up more as well. In our testing we have seen that sometimes the scanning hardware does not accurately scan the bar code from the ticket. Producing a number that does not exist in the bar code. And thus not in our database for this performance. This has often produced a number shorted than the actual bar code on the ticket. I'm not sure we have seen longer codes due to miss scans. We have also seen that the weakest portion of forged / fake tickets is the content of the barcode. Sometimes having the string 1234567890 or ABCDEFGH in some cases the strange numbers or strings could be from a forgery.

The recommendation to the FOH folks has been 1. Check the number on the ticket and the number on the screen. Are they the same? If not rescan. If you can not get a scan that matches the number on the ticket. Send them to the box office for a verification and reprint, this could be a fake. Particularly if you are getting stupid strings like 1234567890 or ABCDEFGH.

--Tom Brown
Business Analytics mgr

Brooklyn Academy of Music BAM
Peter J. Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11217

www.BAM.org

Tbrown@bam.org
718-724-8135



On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 12:36 AM, Sarah Coffey wrote:

Hi folks,

I'm wondering if anyone knows where I can find out a bit more information regarding the N-Scan error message "Ticket number not found." The only thing that I can find in the N-Scan application guide regarding this error is the following:

Ticket Number Not Found – The ticket number does not exist.
NOTE: This error is also displayed if the data scanned cannot be identified as membership record ID, a constituent ID, or external bar code data.

Looking at the T_NSCAN_EVENT_CONTROL table entries with this error, the ticket_no column will generally be either 0 or -1 (although in one case it contains an 8 digit number whereas our current ticket numbers are 7 digits long). Is there any significance to these numbers?

Looking at the scan_str column in the same table, when the "Ticket number not found" message is returned this field is sometimes blank (note blank rather than NULL), sometimes contains a random letter or character, and sometimes contains something that looks very close to one of our bar code strings, but has a letter or character contained in the string.

I would like to be able to explain to our front of house staff the reasons that this error message might be returned when they scan a ticket, but as the customer_no, perf_no, Pkg_no, Seat_no, entrance and sli_no columns in T_NSCAN_EVENT_CONTROL are all NULL when the message is "Ticket number not found" I have nothing to connect the scan back to a specific order.

We have asked front of house to collect the stubs for tickets that scan up with this message so that we can look into the orders that way, but I would be very interested to know if anyone else has looked into the causes of this error message and what you may have discovered.

Sarah