Testing Credit Card Transactions In Payflow Pro (Thanks Dan Vega!)
Posted January 16, 2008 at 2:26 PM
This week, I've been testing the shopping cart and checkout of an eCommerce site that uses Payflow Pro. In order to test credit card transactions, I was using the URL that is right in the LIVE documentation (downloaded last week, prior to testing):
To test your application, direct all transactions to pilot-payflowpro.paypal.com. Transactions directed to this URL are processed through PayPal's simulated payment network, enabling you to test the configuration and operation of your application or storefront -- no money changes hands. (You must activate your account and configure your application for live transactions before accepting real orders.)
After setting up the proper certificate paths and this URL, I went about testing. Immediately, my Payflow Pro requests were timing out and returning this error:
-12 - Timeout waiting for response
The curious thing was that the tag seemed to be completely ignoring the timeout attribute of the CFX tag. We have our requests set to timeout after 45 seconds. The current requests, however, were timing out in 3, maybe 4 seconds. Clearly something was wrong.
No matter what I did, I couldn't fix this. After doing a good deal of Googling, I finally came across a Payflow Pro post by Dan Vega. Although the post was over a year old, I got in contact with him (when it comes to Payflow Pro, Dan is kind of a big deal). Dan suggested that the test URL was wrong. Instead of using:
pilot-payflowpro.paypal.com
... I should try using:
test-payflow.verisign.com
I popped that baby in there, and blam! Things started working. It's so frustrating when the documentation is wrong (at least, that's what I think is going on).
Anyway, a big thanks to Dan Vega!
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Reader Comments
No problem at all, glad you got it working! Are you using there new endpoint? It is really easy to use, a quick cfhttp call with a few paramters and your up and going, no more cfx! :)
Posted by Dan Vega on Jan 16, 2008 at 5:05 PM
@Dan,
Yeah, I'd love to be on the CFHttp end. Kind of came into this project late. Next time!
Posted by Ben Nadel on Jan 16, 2008 at 5:12 PM
Ben,
I've been developing a shopping cart for processing UK transactions via Paypal and it is really frustrating. You have to usually send a support ticket. The response errors are usually wrong and the URLs are different for the UK and the US. The UK url is pilot-payflowpro.verisign.com and in some documentation you see pilot-payflowpro.verisign.com/transaction, the documentation says the one with the transaction but it is incorrect, it took me a week to get some help from their support to get this right!
I really think that they should do something about this.
Posted by Donnie Bachan on Jan 18, 2008 at 10:45 PM
@Donnie,
Absolutely. There's got to be something wrong when the documentation is not telling you where URLs can be used or how they are used properly. Especially when the documentation is so many pages. I should be able to jump down to "Testing Credit Card Transactions" and have the relevant data. Who knows, maybe there was important information in the other parts of the document, but the necessary info should be in the testing section.
Posted by Ben Nadel on Jan 20, 2008 at 9:59 AM
