MassPay API with Ruby On Rails PayPal AARRRGH

Rails
1

Hey,

I’m trying to use Paypal to automatically pay customers, and I’ve heard
MassPay API is a good thing to use. But I cannot find any examples of
it for Ruby, nor do I know what steps to take to use it.

Does anyone have any information or experience with using MassPay API in
RoR? Any help is much appreciated

2

Hello Joe,

2006/12/7, Joe P. [email protected]:

I’m trying to use Paypal to automatically pay customers, and I’ve heard
MassPay API is a good thing to use. But I cannot find any examples of
it for Ruby, nor do I know what steps to take to use it.

Does anyone have any information or experience with using MassPay API in
RoR? Any help is much appreciated

I don’t know what level of integration you are looking for. If your
customer accepts a small amount of manual work, the only thing I did
was to export a CSV file with the list of payments to make. Then, you
need a human to upload this file, select a few items in a form, and
submit.

The rest happens behind the scenes if you set your PayPal IPN URL
correctly.

If you need more information, I can probably help out some more. I
cannot share code, unfortunately, but I can guide you.

Bye !

François Beausoleil
http://blog.teksol.info/
http://piston.rubyforge.org/

3

François Beausoleil wrote:

Hello Joe,

2006/12/7, Joe P. [email protected]:

I’m trying to use Paypal to automatically pay customers, and I’ve heard
MassPay API is a good thing to use. But I cannot find any examples of
it for Ruby, nor do I know what steps to take to use it.

Does anyone have any information or experience with using MassPay API in
RoR? Any help is much appreciated

I don’t know what level of integration you are looking for. If your
customer accepts a small amount of manual work, the only thing I did
was to export a CSV file with the list of payments to make. Then, you
need a human to upload this file, select a few items in a form, and
submit.

The rest happens behind the scenes if you set your PayPal IPN URL
correctly.

If you need more information, I can probably help out some more. I
cannot share code, unfortunately, but I can guide you.

Bye !

François Beausoleil
http://blog.teksol.info/
http://piston.rubyforge.org/

Hi Francois,

I’m trying to completely automate it. Is it possible to do this with
the MassPay API? I’ve also heard that Paypal is working on something
called SendMoney API, but it’s not completed yet.

Joe

4

Hey, thanks for that. I already actually bought that PDF last week; I’m
still trying to get Ruby and Paypal working together.

I found this example, which has been pretty helpful.
http://www.pranavbihari.com/articles/2005/12/02/testing-paypal-web-services-with-ruby-soap4r

I’m still getting some errors when I try to run the test.rb, but I’m
pretty sure they are caused by where my files are.

5

On 12/8/06, Joe P. [email protected] wrote:

I’m trying to completely automate it. Is it possible to do this with
the MassPay API?
I haven’t done a MassPay integration, but I did go through the
DoDirectPayment one. If you look in the PayPal wsdl it referrs to the
MassPayRequestType, MassPayItem, and MassPayResponseType.

https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_api-reference.html

For Ruby, you can download the xml and xsd files and use soap4r to
generate related ruby classes. From those classes you can figure out
what the message really needs to look like. It takes a bit of
research to figure out that a MassPayRequest contains a
MassPayRequestType, and the MassPayRequestType has to have one or more
MassPayRequestItemType’s (but not more than 250).

Once you get that bit sorted out, you can just create the client,
create a tree of Ruby classes that are all related, and send it off to
PayPal. They should send you back a response for each request. One
interesting gotcha: A single request must include items that are of
the same currency.

Be sure to use a recent snapshot of soap4r and http-access2. Also, be
sure to install them in your ruby install directory, not just drop
to them in the /vendor

For an example of how to go through the process for DoExpressPayment, you can check out my Friday at http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/jfpaypal/index.html

The other route would be to figure out how to create the XML yourself
and just do it. This would reduce your dependancies on other
libraries. The ActiveMerchant integration for PayPal does this
approach with DoExpressPayment, and it makes for a more simple
solution.

http://home.leetsoft.com/am

To get the actual XML that is sent/received, you might try using the
Java or PHP libraries.

Let us know what you find,
Joe

“For a new software system, the requirements will not be completely
known until after the users have used it.” Humphrey’s Requirements
Uncertainty Principle.