Receiving multiple success messages

[universalplayground]

Hi Michael,

I was working on transferring my website to the live environment and thought it would be a good idea to test everything once more before opening the new site for the public. While testing the Nice PayPal Download Extension, I noticed that I am receiving about 8 or 9 success messages per purchase by email. (First few messages arrive every minute, later the there is a larger delay)

As I thought it could have to do something with the fact that I copied my site from one location to the other, I checked the settings of the site, uninstalled the Nice PayPal Download Extension and reinstalled an reconfigured it again. Unfortunately the new tests showed the same result.

I have the idea that somehow the communication between PayPal and the extension is not going smoothly. I switched on the IPN-log to check that and noticed that I keep on receiving IPN-messages.

Funny thing is that I didn't have this issue on the development server. Have you got any idea what might be causing this?
Hope we can fix this soon.

cheers,


Jasper

[universalplayground]

Did some research and found the following:

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd= ... IPNTesting

At the bottom of the page it states:

If you receive multiple IPN messages for the same transaction or if messages appear to be out of order, this is not necessarily an indication that your listener is malfunctioning. For example, if you do not respond in time, PayPal resends the message. You should investigate these situations; however, because they could be caused by a logic errors or performance problems as well.

Don't know if that has anything to do with it, but might help with fixing the issue.

cheers,


Jasper

[universalplayground]

Small update, I have fixed the issue........simply by putting my website online....

After going through the code of the extensions and checking if the server could even connect to PayPal to send the validation message (which it could), I noticed the IPN History log at my paypal account. When I had a look at the messages I noticed that all the messages had a 503 error.

It took me a while, but I figured out where the 503 notification originated from. The issue had to do with the online/offline status of my website. If a website is offline (meaning you have to log in as admin to have a look at your website) and you're not logged in (PayPal isn't logged in as well) Joomla is generating a standard message displaying a message like:

This site is down for maintenance. Please check back again soon.

This message is send with a 503 notification.

Apparently Nice PayPal Downloads still processes the IPN message from PayPal, but as Joomla is responding with a 503, the response is not registered at PayPal as valid.

Putting my website online did the trick. It is, however, an interesting issue to look at for future versions of Nice PayPal Downloads. It has cost me quite some time to figure this out.

Apparently more people are facing this issue with integrating paypal in Joomla (not particular Nice PayPal Download users): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7059 ... 16#7659616

[Michael]

Wow, thanks Jasper! I appreciate the information and your effort. It is a most interesting issue. I will need to explore it further at a future date. The most important thing is that the extension is now working correclty with your site!

~ Best regards

[universalplayground]

No worries Michael, I'm quite happy to have it working. The first transactions have taken place and except for one occasion where PayPal didn't send the IPN message, everything is working smoothly.

[Michael]

Perfect!