Paypal payflow name value pairs for item names and descriptions

Question

This is from the PayPal payment page:

Your order summary Descriptions

Current purchase$61.00

Item total $61.00
Tax $5.49

Total $66.49 USD

The "descriptions" field is empty and the only thing displayed are monetary values, and not any description of the transaction, users name, or anything.

I'm sending transactions through name value pairs.

"USER=".$this->user
 . "&VENDOR=".$this->vendor;
 . "&PARTNER=".$this->partner
 . "&PWD=".$this->pwd;
 . "&TRXTYPE=" . $this->trxtype . "&CURRENCY=" . $this->currency
    . "&TENDER=C" //C = Credit Card
    . "&AMT=" . ($data['price'] + $data['shipping'] + $data['tax'])
    . "&ITEMAMT=". $data['price']
    . "&SHIPPINGAMT=". $data['shipping']
    . "&TAXAMT=". $data['tax']
    . "&CUSTOM=". urlencode("RESEARCH POSTER FROM 1: ".$data['desc'])
    . "&DESC=". urlencode("RESEARCH POSTER FROM 2: ".$data['desc'])
    . "&L_DESC0=". urlencode("RESEARCH POSTER FROM 4: ".$data['desc'])
    . "&L_DESC1=". urlencode("RESEARCH POSTER FROM 5: ".$data['desc'])
. "&ITEMNAME=". urlencode("RESEARCH POSTER FROM 6: ".$data['desc'])
. "&NAME=". urlencode("RESEARCH POSTER FROM 7: ".$data['desc'])
. "&L_NAME0=". urlencode("RESEARCH POSTER FROM 3: ".$data['desc'])
. "&LASTNAME=". urlencode($data['lastname'])
. "&FIRSTNAME=". urlencode($data['firstname'])
. "&EMAIL=". $data['email']
. "&VERBOSITY=" . $this->verbosity;

The order summary page, unfortunately, is completely devoid of details. I can not get it to display any descriptions or item names.

What is the name value pair variables that I'm supposed to use?

I've tried, DESC, ITEMNAME, L_NAME0, L_NAME1, NAME, L_DESC0, etc. But none of them work.

Answer 1

The documentation (starting on page 132) shows L_NAMEn, L_DESCn, etc. starting with 0. It also has a note...

To enable line-item support, send an email from the Primary email address on the account to payflow-support@paypal.com

Did you do that?

Answer 2

I had a similar problem using the SetExpressCheckout API. In my case, I was using the API shown at Paypal's Customizing Express Checkout page; the one with the longer argument names — PAYMENTREQUEST_0_AMT instead of AMT, and so on. But even with that, I wasn't getting line items, subtotals, and totals.

In the end, I discovered that adding VERSION=109.0 to the URL arguments fixed my problem. Without that, PayPal's server appeared to be using Version 54.0, which I guess doesn't support line items and totals.