PayPal IPN API Change?

Word Count: 312

Trying saying that title 5 times fast! I have a customer that uses the PayPal IPN (Instant Payment Notification) service. The way the service works is pretty basic. A users places products in a cart on your site, when they are ready to place an order they are transfered to PayPal to place the order. When the order is complete you are transfered back to your shopping cart. So far so simple right? Up until about 2 weeks ago I would say yes.

The code on the site has been working great for the past 3 years and really no complaints from the customer. All of a sudden I have been seeing many errors come through telling me that form.fieldnames is undefined. This is how they used to pass transaction parameters back, through a form structure. Without any warning or announcement (at least that I am aware of) the service no longer passes back a form structure, everything is sent through the URL. I am just amazed that they would change the service like this. I know have to go through and change the code for the client.

Is anyone else having this problem or are they playing a joke on me? If this was public knowledge & no I did not get the memo (Peter)(office space) than I apologize. I am pretty deep in the programming community and have to believe that I would have found out about this If an announcement was made. Ok rant over, please leave a comment If you are having this problem or If I was the one to notify you of it!


Comments

#1 Posted By: Scott Posted On: 7/10/07 4:02 PM
I too have (had) a great working site, and I just stumbled across this website while doing a search - for some answers! Paypal's page is no longer accepting the data properly. You get to the first page, and the attempt to pay with credit card, then a "page not found" page comes up - weird! (And hurting our business until it gets working again!!) My site uses the standard form fields, and it can be checked out here:
http://mckennabookcovers.com/
Any answers or help on this would be greatly appreciated!
#2 Posted By: Dan Vega Posted On: 7/11/07 11:13 AM |
Author Comment
Unfortunately there is no easy answer. The only fix is to change your code to now request url variables instead of form variables.
#3 Posted By: Chris B. Posted On: 8/24/07 4:53 PM
Same here. We've had the same PayPal IPN working perfectly for the last 2+ years and suddenly the return URL and information back to our site is no longer working correctly.

We are still able to receive the customer payment and order information from PayPal, but once the customer clicks to return to our site:
(1) they are no longer logged in and
(2) the items are not subtracted from the available number in our database like it used to previously.

We have not made any changes to the PayPal IPN but we now see that PayPal has made changes to its payment pages and did not bother to check with the large user community and check the impact it's having on so many companies.

We depend on this automated process and the changes are causing headaches. What kind of testing and validation process does PayPal use that ignores its paying customers?


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