Vuzit Document Viewer Blog

Paypal Website Payments Pro (US) with Recurring Billing and ActiveMerchant

When we decided to use Paypal Website Payments Pro (US), we were slightly bummed that ActiveMerchant didn’t support recurring billing. We almost jumped to a different payment processor, but finally decided to roll up our sleeves and write the code ourselves. In the spirit of giving back to the open source community, we have posted the code below under the MIT License used by ActiveMerchant.

I started with the code from the PayflowGateway class, and modified it until it worked with Website Payments Pro. I also took some ideas from a PaypalExpress implementation written by Oleksandr Bondar.

Here is the code:

# The MIT License
#
# Copyright (c) 2008 Vuzit.com, Chris Cera, Tobias Luetke
#
# Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
# of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
# in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
# to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
# copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
# furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
#
# The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
# all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
#
# THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
# IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
# FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
# AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
# LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
# OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
# THE SOFTWARE.

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_merchant'

module ActiveMerchant #:nodoc:
module Billing #:nodoc:
class PaypalGateway < Gateway

# I invented the :suspend action, and this doesn't appear in payflow.rb
RECURRING_ACTIONS = Set.new([:add, :cancel, :inquiry, :suspend])

@@API_VERSION = '50.0' # not sure if this overrides the variable in PaypalCommonAPI

# Several options are available to customize the recurring profile:
#
# * <tt>profile_id</tt> - is only required for editing a recurring profile
# * <tt>starting_at</tt> - takes a Date, Time, or string in mmddyyyy format. The date must be in the future.
# * <tt>name</tt> - The name of the customer to be billed. If not specified, the name from the credit card is used.
# * <tt>periodicity</tt> - The frequency that the recurring payments will occur at. Can be one of
# :bimonthly, :monthly, :biweekly, :weekly, :yearly, :daily, :semimonthly, :quadweekly, :quarterly, :semiyearly
# * <tt>payments</tt> - The term, or number of payments that will be made
# * <tt>comment</tt> - A comment associated with the profile
def recurring(money, credit_card, options = {})
options[:name] = credit_card.name if options[:name].blank? &amp;amp;&amp;amp; credit_card
request = build_recurring_request(options[:profile_id] ? :modify : :add, money, options) do |xml|
add_credit_card(xml, credit_card, options[:billing_address], options) if credit_card
end
commit('CreateRecurringPaymentsProfile', request)
end

# cancels an existing recurring profile
def cancel_recurring(profile_id)
request = build_recurring_request(:cancel, 0, :profile_id => profile_id) {}
commit('ManageRecurringPaymentsProfileStatus', request)
end

# retrieves information about a recurring profile
def recurring_inquiry(profile_id, options = {})
request = build_recurring_request(:inquiry, nil, options.update( :profile_id => profile_id ))
commit('GetRecurringPaymentsProfileDetails', request)
end

# suspends a recurring profile
def suspend_recurring(profile_id)
request = build_recurring_request(:suspend, 0, :profile_id => profile_id) {}
commit('ManageRecurringPaymentsProfileStatus', request)
end

private

def build_recurring_request(action, money, options)
unless RECURRING_ACTIONS.include?(action)
raise StandardError, "Invalid Recurring Profile Action: #{action}"
end

xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new :indent => 2

ns2 = 'n2:'

if [:add].include?(action)
xml.tag! 'CreateRecurringPaymentsProfileReq', 'xmlns' => PAYPAL_NAMESPACE do
xml.tag! 'CreateRecurringPaymentsProfileRequest' do
xml.tag! 'Version', @@API_VERSION, 'xmlns' => EBAY_NAMESPACE

# NOTE: namespace prefix here is critical!
xml.tag! ns2 + 'CreateRecurringPaymentsProfileRequestDetails ', 'xmlns:n2' => EBAY_NAMESPACE do

# credit card and other information goes here
yield xml

xml.tag! ns2 + 'RecurringPaymentsProfileDetails' do
xml.tag! ns2 + 'BillingStartDate', options[:starting_at]
end

xml.tag! ns2 + 'ScheduleDetails' do
xml.tag! ns2 + 'Description', options[:comment]

unless options[:initial_payment].nil?
xml.tag! ns2 + 'TrialPeriod' do
xml.tag! ns2 + 'BillingPeriod', 'Month'
xml.tag! ns2 + 'BillingFrequency', 1
xml.tag! ns2 + 'TotalBillingCycles', 1
xml.tag! ns2 + 'Amount', amount(options[:initial_payment]), 'currencyID' => options[:currency] || currency(options[:initial_payment])
end
end

frequency, period = get_pay_period(options)
xml.tag! ns2 + 'PaymentPeriod' do
xml.tag! ns2 + 'BillingPeriod', period
xml.tag! ns2 + 'BillingFrequency', frequency.to_s
xml.tag! ns2 + 'TotalBillingCycles', options[:payments] unless options[:payments].nil? || options[:payments] == 0
xml.tag! ns2 + 'Amount', amount(money), 'currencyID' => options[:currency] || currency(money)
end

xml.tag! ns2 + 'AutoBillOutstandingAmount', 'AddToNextBilling'
end
end
end
end
elsif [:cancel, :suspend].include?(action)
xml.tag! 'ManageRecurringPaymentsProfileStatusReq', 'xmlns' => PAYPAL_NAMESPACE do
xml.tag! 'ManageRecurringPaymentsProfileStatusRequest', 'xmlns:n2' => EBAY_NAMESPACE do
xml.tag! ns2 + 'Version', @@API_VERSION
xml.tag! ns2 + 'ManageRecurringPaymentsProfileStatusRequestDetails' do
xml.tag! 'ProfileID', options[:profile_id]
xml.tag! ns2 + 'Action', action == :cancel ? 'Cancel' : 'Suspend'
xml.tag! ns2 + 'Note', 'Canceling the action, no real comment here'
end
end
end
elsif [:inquiry].include?(action)
xml.tag! 'GetRecurringPaymentsProfileDetailsReq', 'xmlns' => PAYPAL_NAMESPACE do
xml.tag! 'GetRecurringPaymentsProfileDetailsRequest', 'xmlns:n2' => EBAY_NAMESPACE do
xml.tag! ns2 + 'Version', @@API_VERSION
xml.tag! 'ProfileID', options[:profile_id]
end
end
end
end

def get_pay_period(options)
requires! (options, [:periodicity, :bimonthly, :monthly, :biweekly, :weekly, :yearly, :daily, :semimonthly, :quadweekly, :quarterly, :semiyearly])
case options[:periodicity]
when :weekly then [1, 'Week']
when :biweekly then [2, 'Week']
when :semimonthly then [1, 'SemiMonth']
when :quadweekly then [4, 'Week']
when :monthly then [1, 'Month']
when :quarterly then [3, 'Month']
when :semiyearly then [6, 'Month'] # broken! i think
when :yearly then [1, 'Year']
end
end

end
end
end

Examples

Here are some incomplete snippets that should get you started with this code. Please note that the :payments and :initial_payment options were not part of the PayflowGateway.

Start a recurring payment profile:

options = {
# :name => # if not spec'd, the name on card will be used
# :profile_id => 'I-SEVK234C8U1M', # triggers :modify on recurring
:email => 'joe.customer@vuzit.com',
:starting_at => '2008-05-09T00:00:00', # change this

:periodicity => :monthly,
:comment => 'CHANGEME',
:billing_address => billing_address,
:payments => 0,
:initial_payment => 2500
}

ActiveMerchant::Billing::PaypalGateway.pem_file = @@fd_key
ActiveMerchant::Billing::Base.mode = :test

gateway = ActiveMerchant::Billing::PaypalGateway.new(
:login => @@merchant_username,
:password => @@merchant_password
)

response = gateway.recurring(amount, card, options)

Retrieve information about an existing payment profile:

response = gateway.recurring_inquiry(options[:profile_id])

Suspend an existing payment profile. Please note that this was not included in the PayflowGateway class:

response = gateway.suspend_recurring(options[:profile_id])

Cancel an existing payment profile:

response = gateway.cancel_recurring(options[:profile_id])

I strongly recommend to anyone extending the Gateway classes to immediately override the parse() method so you can inspect the Paypal response in it’s entirety, and not the cleaned version from ActiveMerchant.

We hope you find this contribution useful. This is our way of saying thank you to the Ruby community that have helped us so greatly.