Study Guide

Table Of Contents
PayPal Certified Developer Program Study Guide March 2008 53
5
Name-Value Pair (NVP) API
In this chapter, you will learn:
z The basic steps for using the PayPal Name-Value Pair (NVP) API to integrate an
application with PayPal
z How to communicate with the PayPal server using the request/response model and secure
HTTP
Integrating with the PayPal API
The NVP API is a simple, programmatic interface that allows merchants to access the PayPal
API.
The NVP API makes it easy to integrate PayPal with a web. Simply construct an NVP string
and post it to the PayPal server using HTTPS. PayPal posts back a response in NVP format.
To get started with the PayPal NVP API, see the samples at
https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_nvp.html
. An application can use the samples to
send API calls to the PayPal Sandbox test environment. The web samples are documented in
PayPal Name-Value Pair API Developer Guide and Reference.
Basic Steps
This section describes the basic steps for programming with the NVP API.
Create a Web Application
The NVP API implementation usually runs in a web application. You can write a new
application from scratch or use one of the samples as a starting point.
Get API Credentials
To access the API, API credentials are needed for identification (either an API signature or
API certificate).
For more information on API credentials, see “API Credentials” on page 47.