MassPay API with Ruby On Rails PayPal AARRRGH

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello Joe,

I'm trying to use Paypal to automatically pay customers, and I've heard MassPay API is a good thing to use. But I cannot find any examples of it for Ruby, nor do I know what steps to take to use it.

Does anyone have any information or experience with using MassPay API in RoR? Any help is much appreciated

I don't know what level of integration you are looking for. If your customer accepts a small amount of manual work, the only thing I did was to export a CSV file with the list of payments to make. Then, you need a human to upload this file, select a few items in a form, and submit.

The rest happens behind the scenes if you set your PayPal IPN URL correctly.

If you need more information, I can probably help out some more. I cannot share code, unfortunately, but I can guide you.

Bye !

2

I haven't done a MassPay integration, but I did go through the DoDirectPayment one. If you look in the PayPal wsdl it referrs to the MassPayRequestType, MassPayItem, and MassPayResponseType.

https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_api-reference.html

For Ruby, you can download the xml and xsd files and use soap4r to generate related ruby classes. From those classes you can figure out what the message really needs to look like. It takes a bit of research to figure out that a MassPayRequest contains a MassPayRequestType, and the MassPayRequestType has to have one or more MassPayRequestItemType's (but not more than 250).

Once you get that bit sorted out, you can just create the client, create a tree of Ruby classes that are all related, and send it off to PayPal. They should send you back a response for each request. One interesting gotcha: A single request must include items that are of the same currency.

Be sure to use a recent snapshot of soap4r and http-access2. Also, be sure to _install_ them in your ruby install directory, not just drop to them in the /vendor

<shamelessplug> For an example of how to go through the process for DoExpressPayment, you can check out my Friday at http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/jfpaypal/index.html </shamelessplug>

The other route would be to figure out how to create the XML yourself and just do it. This would reduce your dependancies on other libraries. The ActiveMerchant integration for PayPal does this approach with DoExpressPayment, and it makes for a more simple solution.

http://home.leetsoft.com/am

To get the actual XML that is sent/received, you might try using the Java or PHP libraries.

Let us know what you find, Joe