2009

Name-Value Pair API Developer Guide 08 April 2009 135
Recurring Payments and Reference Transactions API Operations
DoReferenceTransaction API
DoReferenceTransaction Request Fields
Field Description
METHOD (Required) Must be DoReferenceTransaction.
REFERENCEID (Required) A transaction ID from a previous purchase, such as a credit card charge
using the DoDirectPayment API, or a billing agreement ID.
PAYMENTACTION (Optional) How you want to obtain payment:
z Authorization indicates that this payment is a basic authorization subject to
settlement with PayPal Authorization & Capture.
z Sale indicates that this is a final sale for which you are requesting payment.
RETURNFMFDETAILS (Optional) Flag to indicate whether you want the results returned by Fraud
Management Filters. By default, you do not receive this information.
z 0 - do not receive FMF details (default)
z 1 - receive FMF details
SOFTDESCRIPTOR (Optional) The soft descriptor is a per transaction description of the payment that is
passed to the consumer’s credit card statement.
If a value for the soft descriptor field is provided, the full descriptor displayed on the
customer’s statement has the following format:
<PP * | PAYPAL *><Merchant descriptor as set in the Payment
Receiving Preferences><1 space><soft descriptor>
The soft descriptor can contain only the following characters:
z Alphanumeric characters
z - (dash)
z * (asterisk)
z . (period)
z {space}
If you use any other characters (such as “,”), an error code is returned.The soft
descriptor does not include the phone number, which can be toggled between the
merchant’s customer service number and PayPal’s customer service number.The
maximum length of the total soft descriptor is 22 characters. Of this, either 4 or 8
characters are used by the PayPal prefix shown in the data format. Thus, the
maximum length of the soft descriptor passed in the API request is:
22 - len(<PP * | PAYPAL *>) - len(<Descriptor set in Payment
Receiving Preferences> + 1)
For example, assume the following conditions:
z The PayPal prefix toggle is set to PAYPAL * in PayPal’s admin tools.
z The merchant descriptor set in the Payment Receiving Preferences is set to EBAY.
z The soft descriptor is passed in as JanesFlowerGifts LLC
The resulting descriptor string on the credit card would be:
PAYPAL *EBAY JanesFlow