BalanceInquiry Method

Retrieves the current balances of Food Stamp and Cash Benefit accounts on an EBT card.

Syntax

 int BalanceInquiry();

Remarks

A BalanceInquiry transaction requests that FDMS return the amount of funds remaining on the customer's EBT Card. No charge is made to the customer's card. The balance results from a balance inquiry on a Food Stamps card will be returned in ResponseBeginningBalance, ResponseAvailableBalance, and ResponseEndingBalance. The balance results from an inquiry on a Cash Benefits card will be returned in ResponseCashBeginningBalance, ResponseCashAvailableBalance, and ResponseCashEndingBalance. For a card that accesses both Food Stamp and Cash Benefit accounts, all six balances may be returned.

Important Note: You must ping your list of service provider URLs and update the URL property to the service provider with the shortest response time every 100 transactions, as well as when your application initially starts. This is not a normal ICMP ping - to determine the fastest transaction URL you must use the special Ping method inside the FDMSRegister class. (You may update your list of service provider URLs with the FDMSRegister class's ServiceDiscovery method).