Getting PayPal MassPay Transaction Status with Source Correlation ID

Question

We have a system that sends money to our users through the PayPal MassPay API, and it works fine, but here's the problem: I can’t find a way to get the MassPay transaction status through the PayPal API .

The first thing I looked at was using the PayPal API "GetTransactionDetails", but this requires a transaction ID that is not returned by the original PayPal MassPay API call. When MassPay is issued, here is PayPal's answer: https://gist.github.com/3860194

As you can see in the answer, PayPal gives me the correlation identifier, but not the transaction identifier. My next thought was to use the TransactionSearch API call, but that also does not accept the correlation identifier. I even tried to do an extensive TransactionSearch based on the TransactionClass ("MassPay") and StartDate parameter, but the responses do not contain any information (email id or correlation) that allows me to know exactly what the search result was my initial request.

Has anyone worked with the PayPal API to search / retrieve a transaction identifier through a correlation identifier?

Answer 1

After sending MassPay listen to IPN (Instant Payment Notifications)? The IPN response will contain PayPal transaction identifiers for the individual payments you sent. After you grab the trxn identifiers from IPN, you should be able to call the GetTransactionDetails API - and get the current status.

Note that the IPN will also contain the current transaction status at the time of sending the IPN.

Answer 2

ah, the drawback of Mass Pay is only that the IPN Url is set in the account, and you cannot configure the IPN URL even when sending Mass Pay via API (NVP / Soap)

You can use TransactionSearch with Transactionclass => MassPay to find TransactionIds for your bulk payments, then get information from there.

Answer 3

I sometimes get IPNs for my bulk boards that say

payment_status=Denied 

and

 status_1=Failed status_2=Failed status_3=Failed 

and

 masspay_txn_id_1= masspay_txn_id_2= masspay_txn_id_3= 

(assuming I paid 3 people in this mass payment)

There is no correction, although I can use to match this IPN back to the original mass payment request I made. I am stuck with these phantom payments on my system that paypal never sent to recipients. Does anyone have any suggestions for correlating the API call for mass payments with NVP for the entire Mass Pay or for individual transactions within it?