Authorizing a preapproved_payment_key with active_paypal_adaptive_payment gem

Question

Man, I'm tearing my hair out over this one. Paypal's documentation is so complicated and incomplete, and there is little native ruby support for Adaptive Payments.

Anyway, I'm building a web app from which I want to be able to set up preapproved payments using PayPal Adaptive Payments. I've gotten the active_paypal_adaptive_payment gem to work, but there's no documentation on the process for going from preapproval to capturing payments.

I can use the preapprove_payment method of the gem to get a preapproval key from PayPal:

response = ADAPTIVE_GATEWAY.preapprove_payment ({
  :return_url => admin_preapproved_payments_url,
  :cancel_url => admin_preapproved_payments_url,
  :senderEmail => @payment.sender_email,
  :start_date => @payment.start_date,
  :end_date => @payment.end_date,
  :currency_code =>"USD",
  :max_amount => @payment.max_amount.to_s,
  :maxNumberOfPayments => @payment.max_number_of_payments.to_s
  })
  puts response.preapproval_key

But the sender needs to authorize the preapproval key before I can use it to capture funds from their account.

Where do I redirect the sender so they can authorize the preapproval key? I don't want to capture funds immediately – I just need their approval so I can do so in the future.

Answer 1

I would suggest to try out ActiveMerchant with paypal

Answer 2

The method redirect_pre_approval_url_for(token) is what you need, it returns a URL to which you should (well, obviously) redirect the user in order to authorize the preapproved payment.

redirect_pre_approval_url_for(token)

So, in a rails application things should look like this:

redirect_to ADAPTIVE_GATEWAY.redirect_pre_approval_url_for(response.preapproval_key)