Official blog of blokes at ByteAlly

We recently had a requirement where we had to find the “verification” status of any given paypal account. This might be very useful to reduce the risk of online frauds. I was searching for a Ruby on rails plugin for PayPal’s adaptive accounts API. Neither did i have the time nor the patience to go through the search results. Looking at the GetVerifiedStatus Adaptive Accounts API it looked damn straight forward. So i went ahead to implement it with my own code.

Its pretty simple. I used the httpclient gem, which is pretty cool, to make the http request. You can install it by doing

 gem install httpclient

I also use the xmlsimple gem to process the response from the API. Makes things a lot easier.

 gem install xml-simple

Once you have the gems installed, these are the parameters you got to watch out for

The end point for Sandbox is

https://svcs.sandbox.paypal.com/AdaptiveAccounts/GetVerifiedStatus

And the production end point is

https://svcs.paypal.com/AdaptiveAccounts/GetVerifiedStatus

The entire code. Here you go!

def verify_paypal
   #include the gems needed
    require 'httpclient'
    require 'xmlsimple'
   #set the header of the request
    header =  {"X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-USERID" => "tok261_biz_api.abc.com",
               "X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-PASSWORD" => "1244612379",
               "X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-SIGNATURE" => "lkfg9groingghb4uw5",
               "X-PAYPAL-REQUEST-DATA-FORMAT" => "NV",
               "X-PAYPAL-RESPONSE-DATA-FORMAT" => "XML",
               "X-PAYPAL-APPLICATION-ID" =>  "APP-80W284485P519543T"
                }
    #data to be sent in the request
    data = {"emailAddress" => params[:paypal],
           "firstName"=> current_user.first_name,
           "lastName" => current_user.last_name,
           "matchCriteria"=> "NAME",
           "requestEnvelope.errorLanguage" => "en_US"}
    #initialize the request
    clnt = HTTPClient.new
    #API end point(sandbox)
    uri = "https://svcs.sandbox.paypal.com/AdaptiveAccounts/GetVerifiedStatus"
    #make the post
    res = clnt.post(uri, data, header)
   #if the request is successfull parse the XML
   if res.status == 200
     @xml = XmlSimple.xml_in(res.content)
     #check if the status node exists in the xml
     if @xml['accountStatus']!=nil
       account_status = @xml['accountStatus'][0]
       #its pretty obvious from here init?
         if account_status.to_s() == "VERIFIED"
            render :text => "Account verified"
        else
            render :text => "Oopsy! Yet to be verified"
        end

    else
       render :text => "Gee! sorry! something went seriously wrong"
    end

  end

 end

Breaking it down. First the request header. PayPal expects the following parameters in the request header

#set the headers of the request
 #X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-USERID = <Your API username>
 #X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-PASSWORD = <Your API password>
 #X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-SIGNATURE = <Your API signature>
 #X-PAYPAL-REQUEST-DATA-FORMAT = NV
 #Please note that for sandbox you can use APP-80W284485P519543T
 # as the X-PAYPAL-APPLICATION-ID
 header =  {"X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-USERID" => "tok261_biz_api.abc.com",
 "X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-PASSWORD" => "1244612379",
 "X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-SIGNATURE" => "lkfg9groingghb4uw5",
 "X-PAYPAL-REQUEST-DATA-FORMAT" => "NV",
 "X-PAYPAL-RESPONSE-DATA-FORMAT" => "XML",
 "X-PAYPAL-APPLICATION-ID" =>  "APP-80W284485P519543T"
 }

In the above snippet if you notice, im sending the data as name value pairs in the request.

"X-PAYPAL-REQUEST-DATA-FORMAT" => "NV"

and consuming the response data in XML format.

"X-PAYPAL-RESPONSE-DATA-FORMAT" => "XML"

Please note that paypal sends and accepts data as NV,XML,JSON

Now comes the data to be sent along the request

data = {"emailAddress" => "vindibly@dibly.net",
 "firstName"=> "vin",
 "lastName" => "dibly",
 "matchCriteria"=> "NAME",
 "requestEnvelope.errorLanguage" => "en_US"}

All the parameters are required for GetVerifiedStatus call. firstName, lastName, matchCriteria. The parameter matchCriteria takes only the value “NAME” as of now and this is case sensitive. The API checks if the account is the name of “vin dibly” in case of our example. If that varies, status is returned as unknown. So we got to make sure the user provides or your system has the right first and last name of the user.

The rest of it

clnt = HTTPClient.new

sandbox url

uri = "https://svcs.sandbox.paypal.com/AdaptiveAccounts/GetVerifiedStatus"

Post the data with the header information to the API

res = clnt.post(uri, data, header)

check if the request is succesfull

if res.status == 200

#now parse the response content(which happens to be a XML in our case)

@xml = XmlSimple.xml_in(res.content)

make sure the node isnt nil and check the status value

 if @xml['accountStatus']!=nil

#yep this is where the status sits
 account_status = @xml['accountStatus'][0]

#you know what to do if its a verified account
 if account_status.to_s() == "VERIFIED"

#do your logic
 render :text => "Account verified"
 else
 render :text => "Oopsy! Yet to be verified"
 end

 else
 render :text => "Gee! sorry! something went seriously wrong"
 end
 end