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We made an Android mobile app for a customers of ours which helps users unlock their phones from their current network. The app asks the user for their email address, IMEI, current network and handset model so the phone can be unlocked. We were using a payment provider called Zooz, but our customer wants to switch to Paypal.

With Zooz, when a customer made a purchase, Zooz would automatically send all the customer entered parameters (email address, IMEI, current network and handset model) in the billing/payment email to our client's email address. He could then take these parameters and process the unlock.

Is there any way we can do the same with the Paypal API? i.e. get Paypal to send these parameters with the payment/transaction notification? We've looked but can't seem to find a way.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Avijit
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user2361875
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1 Answers1

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There are a couple of different ways to handle it. Are you working with the Mobile Payments Library? I'll assume so, which means you'd be working with the Adaptive Payments API.

In that case, what you would need to do is go ahead and gather the info that you're having the user fill in and save it to your database prior to sending them over to PayPal for payment. Then you can pass the record ID of the new record you saved over to PayPal along with the other payment details.

Then you'll want to setup PayPal IPN in order to process transactions in real-time. The record ID that you passed to the payment will come back in IPN so you can pull all the details back out of your database in order to include them in an email, update other database tables, hit 3rd party web services, etc.

So the steps would be...

1) Build form for user to enter details and save to database. 2) Call the Pay API to generate a paykey for the checkout. 3) Call the SetPaymentOptions API and pass in the paykey that you got from the Pay response along with any other details you want to include. SetPaymentOptions is where you can set the CustomID, which would be your record ID from your database. 4) Redirect the user to PayPal per the Pay API flow.
5) User completes payment which triggers the IPN to be sent to your IPN listener. 6) IPN listener receives the IPN data, pulls whatever it needs back out of your database, and proceeds to generate a customized, branded email notification that you send to whoever needs it.

If you happen to be working with PHP I'd recommend taking a look at my class library for PayPal. It will make the API calls very simple for you, and in fact it comes with a PayWithOptions() function that combines Pay and SetPaymentOptions into a single request to make that part a little more simple.

Hope that helps!

Drew Angell
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