Adding your own card to the Payments simulator to test your system

Posted on 29th Sep 2018 5533 views

Follow these easy steps to add a card. Repeat the steps or use some Excel skills to add multiple cards.

Edit the spreadsheet of cards

Open the test cases sheet ISO8583_TestCases_vx.x.xlsm, located in the test_data folder.

Open the sheet named ISO8583_card.

You will notice several rows of dummy cards with all card details.

Edit the card data

For simplicity, Copy any row and paste on the first empty row to make a duplicate of an existing card.

Modify/ Edit the rows CardID, PAN, sequence number and all the relevant columns for you.

Make sure the Card ID is unique (first column), otherwise the search for cards will always get the first occurrence.

Set a description that is relevant for the future understanding of the cards usage (e.g: RealCard, MasterCard for test, Visa for regression).

Repeat the steps above as many times as you need to add all the records.

Save the new cards

IMPORTANT! SAVE your cards by pressing the "Save Test Data CSV" button next to the neaPay logo inside the spreadsheet! See Image below!

Click YES to overwrite the CSV files on the disk!

These csv files will have the new information.

For Cards, the csv file is called ISO8583_Card.csv

It is reccomended, for maintenance purposes, to NOT edit the CSV files directly. They are generated by the spreadsheet.

Check the csv files on the disk that they have changed and the date is new.

Load the new cards

The simulator will automatically look for cards in file ISO8583_Card.csv

The ISO8583 simulator requires this file to populate transaction data.

Importing data from test environments is just as easy! We assume you cannot simply connect Excel to the SQL database, but you need to work this manually.

1. Export the data from your environment in an SQL-like form; INSERT INTO table_name (column1, column2, column3, ...) VALUES (value1, value2, value3, ...);
2. Use a text editor to format the data and remove the column definitions. Keep just the values:value1, value2, value3, ...
3.  Rearrange the columns to match the spreadsheet layout : Card ID,Description,PAN,App_PAN,Sequence number,PIN,PIN Block Format,Expiry Date,Discretionary Data Format,Service Code ,PVKI,PVV,PVV2,PIN Offset,PIN Offset 2,CVV,iCVV,CVV2,dCVV,Name/Location,Effective Date,L Code,Billing currency,Account,CDG,Track2,Track3,Offset,EMVStandard,**END**;
4. Import this data into the spreadsheet via the Excel menu Data -> Get External Data -> Import from Text;
5. IMPORTANT! SAVE your cards by pressing the Save button next to the neaPay logo inside the spreadsheet! See Image above!
6. Click YES to overwrite the CSV files on the disk! These csv files will have the new information.
7. Optional: Check the csv files on the disk that they have changed and the date is new.

Thank you for following this article! Please leave us a note below if something is wrong or unclear, we will review and change it asap!