python-payflowpro on-demand payments

Question

I'm trying to build a python solution where a user can enter a credit card which will be submitted and saved to the Payflow pro servers and can be billed on an on-demand basis. I know python-payflowpro supports recurring billing, but that occurs on a regular schedule, such as weekly or monthly. I'm looking to find a solution that will bill a user's card at their request without them having to enter in their card information.

I've looked through the payflow pro api docs and it looks like there is some feature where you can bill a user's account multiple times if you have the transaction id that payflow pro gives you. However, I'm not sure if this is only so merchants can make adjustments to an existing order (such as the customer wishes to later add an additional item). And I don't think that python-payflowpro supports this.

Has anyone used payflow in this way to store credit cards online and make on-demand payments to them? Is there an existing python api for this, whether it be python-payflowpro or something else? Or do I have to roll my own API for this?

I'm pretty new to payflow, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. Was wondering how other people approached this situation.

Thank you for reading and for your consideration. Joe

This is the python-payflowpro package that I am currently using: https://github.com/bkeating/python-payflowpro/blob/master/payflowpro/tests/client.py

Answer 1

Looking closer at the api source code, I found an undocumented function called reference_transaction, which allows reference transactions. It seems to allow you to make use of PayPal's Reference Transactions and allow you to store credit cards online and charge them on an ad-hoc basis. https://github.com/bkeating/python-payflowpro/blob/master/payflowpro/client.py#L259

With a little digging, I found a way to utilize this api method, but had to do a few tricks to pass in the proper arguments. I've documented them here: https://github.com/bkeating/python-payflowpro/issues/5