UPOS — Enhance FiscalPrinter category for new regulation in Germany

From 2020 a new fiscal regulation will be in place in Germany. For that a certified technical safety device has been defined which has to be installed to log retail business transaction data.

Even if this device is not a printer as nothing is printed, only data is stored, the workflow for logging the fiscal data is similar to FiscalPrinter devices in other fiscal countries. Until the UnifiedPOS 2 Fiscal API is not ready, it seems pragmatically sufficient to reuse the FiscalPrinter API from UnifiedPOS 1 to satisfy the German new regulation.

A major requirement from the regulation is to print a regulation conform receipt. Whereas the format of the receipt is completely free (therefore the maybe already implemented POSPrinter API can be reused here by the applications), the content is regulated.
One of the content requirements is to print the date and time of start and end of the business transaction.

This requires the application to fetch those date and time information from the device. There is a method getDate with property DateType to fetch date and time information from a FiscalPrinter device. Unfortunately, there is no adequate enumeration values defined for fetching the date-time of a receipt start or end.

Add new enumaration values to the FiscalPrinter category

Diebold Nixdorf proposes to add the following enumeration values to the definition of the property DateType:

FPTR_DT_TICKET_START: The date and time when the current fiscal receipt was started. If no fiscal receipt is opened currently, the date and time when the last receipt was opened.

FPTR_DT_TICKET_END: The date and time when the last fiscal receipt was closed.

Additionally, for consistency, we propose to add Germany to the list of fiscal countries the property CountryCode may hold:

FPTR_CC_Germany: The Fiscal Printer device supports German fiscal rules, but may not print fiscal receipts, only business transaction data is registered.