Retrieving form fields in the IPN file?

[Jaace]

I've been gone from these boards from awhile...but now I'm back...with a question, no less!

I have my multi-page form sending to Paypal perfectly...everything is saving to the database, etc. But I want to do something in the ipn file with some of the fields collected from the form. I want to do it in this file because that's the only way to be sure that the payment was paid (or at least that the user clicked 'pay' in the Paypal site).

I've tried retrieving the fields a number of ways including adding the line $fields = ft_api_init_form_page(); to the top of the ipn.php file and referencing the fields like so: $fields['fieldname'] and @$fields['fieldname']. Neither way works...

I've also tried getting them through the $_POST variable and this doesn't want to give me anything either. What am I doing wrong here? I'm sure there must be a way to get the values here since it makes it all the way back to the success page where I can grab the values no problem via @$fields.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

[Ben]

Hi Jaace,

Welcome back!

Yeah, those approaches you mentioned wouldn't work. They rely on sessions already being set up; since the ipn.php page is just called when PayPal submits info of the successful transaction it won't have access to the form values.

Instead, you'll need to be a bit sneaky...

The POST request that PayPal sends to ipn.php will contain a $_POST["custom"] key containing the unique submission ID. You'll need to use that info to query the database and get the submission info by that route.

What you could do is use a function from the Core that retrieves the submission info:

PHP Code:

$submission_info = ft_get_submission_info($form_id, $submission_id); 


You'll need to pass your form ID and submission ID. It returns a hash (associative array) or database column names => form field values.

If you haven't already done so, go to the Edit Form -> Database tab and click "Smart Fill" for the database column names. This will rename all the database column names to make them the same as your form field names. It makes things a lot less complicated, let me tell you.

Good luck!

- Ben

[Jaace]

Thanks Ben! I will give that a try today and post back if I've got any problems.