Developer's Guide

Website Payments Pro Developer’s Guide 15
3
Creating a Simple Transaction
Request
This chapter describes how to create a simple Sale transaction request.
The chapter focuses on the common set of parameters required in all transactions and how
you set up these parameters using name-value pair strings. Additional parameters are required,
depending on the transaction type. You can also provide many optional parameters, depending
on the results you want returned. For example, you can set the VERBOSITY parameter to
return PayPal processor-specific details rather than normalised information if you are looking
for this kind of information.
In This Chapter
z “Transaction Request” on page 15
z “Sale Transaction Example” on page 18
z “How to Format a Transaction” on page 19
Transaction Request
Request Contents
A transaction request includes the following:
z Connection parameters.
z Parameters required by all transactions. This list includes 'user information' parameters.
z Additional parameters required by the type of transaction.
Data Modes for Sending
You can send parameter data in the transaction request to the Payflow server in either
of two modes:
z Name-value pair
z XMLPay
The examples in this guide are presented in name-value pair format. Name-value pair syntax
guidelines are described in “PARMLIST Syntax Guidelines” on page 16.
XMLPay is an XML syntax for payment requests and associated responses in a
payment-processing network. Instead of using name-value pairs, you can send to the Payflow
server XML documents based on the XMLPay 2.0 schema. For details on XMLPay, see the
Website Payments Pro — XMLPay Developer’s Guide. It is available from the Documentation
page in PayPal Manager.