Device Scanning

Your mobile applications may integrate with two or more Allegion SDKs. Examples of needing to do this include:

• to offer device setup and management of YP and Engage devices in a single app, or
• to offer device management and mobile credentials in the same app.

Today, while certain versions of the Allegion SDKs are compatible with each other (consult their respective Readmes and repositories for more information), the workflow of scanning for devices is separate for each SDK. However, there are ways to order operations that improve user experience, especially in terms of waiting time.

Outlined below is an approach that may improve user experience in your mobile app when integrating with more than one Allegion SDK, if you wish to combine the results of scanning operations. It is, of course, possible to keep the scanning workflows separate and provide the user the ability to scan for devices using the appropriate SDK for their selection (e.g. select ‘Engage’ or a specific Engage device to scan for Engage devices, and similarly with YP devices).

In this example, the mobile application provides the means to manage YP- and Engage-hosted devices. One possible implementation would be:

1. By tapping a single ‘scan’ option (or similar), the user triggers the scanning of all available compatible devices.
2. This trigger begins scanning operations for both Engage-hosted devices (via the EDC SDK) and YP-hosted devices (via the YPDC SDK) to run in parallel to save time. You can also do this in series, but this will take longer overall.
3. When both scanning operations have completed, your app will need to aggregate the separate lists and present the combined results to the user.

This will provide the user with the full list of in-range available devices with which they can work, instead of running sequential and separate workflows for Engage- and YP-hosted devices.

Additional performance note: Check the release notes of your Allegion SDKs for details on whether they include the Common Core or “BLE caching”. This includes a feature for BLE peripheral caching that, when enabled on a given SDK, can provide a quicker scanning experience by caching the scan data.