I am working for a online donation website and we accept onetime donation and monthly donation ( subscription) through paypal. We proide a "return" url so when donor finish donation, they will go back the "return" url to our site. Paypal provides some payment data variables by hidden input back to our site, like txn_id, etc, we will save those transaction data into our database.
This was working fine until we enabled "Auto return" option. We found we got empty records in our database.
I created sandbox account and tested it, found out
1. when "auto return" is disabled:
if donor click "return to mechant site", paypal page does post those transaction data back to our site:
SUCCESS
first_name=Jane
last_name=Smith
payment_status=Completed
payer_email=janedoesmith%40hotmail.com
...
both onetime payment and monthly subscription are working ok.
2. when "auto return" is enabled:
Only onetime payment will have those payment data; monthly subscription with auto return enabled does not return any payment data.
I checked the html source code before Paypal redirect to our return url, and found it only has three hidden input:
<input type="hidden" id="CONTEXT_CGI_VAR" name="CONTEXT" value="wtgSziM4C5x0SI-9CmKcv2vkSeTLK5P_g6HqzC__YTYkcqziFNcB84p79Ja"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td align="center"><br>Your payment for $1.00 USD has been completed.<br><br>You are now being redirected to <span class="emphasis">facilitator account's Test Store</span><br><br>If you are not redirected within 5 seconds <a href="our_return_url">click here</a>.<br><br></td></tr></table><input name="auth" type="hidden" value="A-cG8db7da4Hud0Y4LNhbta-OQUSw189IYtEA.SeYYcnjJuCzM4Gd4b2LfpgaCtG33ICmVgTAlKyqX8QoTXQyiA"><input name="form_charset" type="hidden" value="UTF-8">
so my question is how can we get full payment data for monthly subscription when auto return is enabled ?
For me, this looks like a bug, at least inconsistent behavior for monthly subscription.
Thanks,
-Jack
