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There was an error with the paypal payment method in your store

Started by sylwekb, July 08, 2019, 21:56:00 PM

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sylwekb

Joomla 3.9.8 Virtuemart 3.4.2

Today I received an e-mail with the following message. This is the first time I have encountered such a problem. How to solve it?

Message bottom

Hello,

There was an error with the paypal payment method in your shop. trailer. details have been registered in the paypal.2.log.php file

. Team

Jörgen

Firstly, read the error file.

Jörgen@ Kreativ Fotografi
Joomla 3.9.18
Virtuemart 3.4.x
Olympiantheme Hera (customized)
This reflects current status when viewing old post.

sylwekb

In this file, I have only 2 entries. What do they mean?

2019-07-08 19:40:50 ERROR validateIpnContent: Invalid IPN validation: NO ANSWER FROM PAYPAL
2019-07-08 19:41:31 ERROR validateIpnContent: Invalid IPN validation: NO ANSWER FROM PAYPAL

AH

It means PayPal did not respond to VM when it tried to verify an IPN message

This can happen and is not VM's issue.

If it continues - contact PayPal support
Regards
A

Joomla 3.10.11
php 8.0

clairemarie

I wanted to add to this post that I have also started receiving these messages.
14 occasions in the last 2 weeks.

I have raised a ticket with https://www.paypal-support.com - 5 days later I am still awaiting a response.


AH

If you have an account manager contact - it is often best to talk with them.

I spent weeks getting them to admit that a fault was down to them - eventually they said they were in the middle of software changes.

This IPN message validation failure is annoying for busy stores - but it is not a VM issue -  as per the PayPal specification for security purposes VM has to ensure that the IPN message is validated before it modifies an order to confirmed.
Regards
A

Joomla 3.10.11
php 8.0

level420

@clairemarie did you ever get an answer from paypal support?

I've also had 2 orders which failed due to the "NO ANSWER FROM PAYPAL" error.

@AH As I've understood the code in root/plugins/vmpayment/paypal/paypal/helpers/paypal.php in function validateIpnContent the error is logged if neither VERIFIED nor INVALID is contained as a string in the answer from the paypal server.
IMHO the error message misleading as the server DOES send an answer, but does not contain the desired keywords. I think it would be very valuable to have the content of the answer for debugging purposes and name it accordingly.


Quote from: clairemarie on July 13, 2019, 08:31:35 AM
I wanted to add to this post that I have also started receiving these messages.
14 occasions in the last 2 weeks.

I have raised a ticket with https://www.paypal-support.com - 5 days later I am still awaiting a response.



AH

The code sets a $res as '' (empty)

It looks for data in a response allocated to $res

If it sees a value of VERIFIED - then it assumes all is good so far

If it sees a value of INVALID - it logs a debug error with $res

"Invalid IPN validation"

If $res is empty or does not contain INVALID OR VERIFIED it will log a different debug error from INVALID

"Invalid IPN validation : NO ANSWER FROM PAYPAL"

And as you noted - it does not include and $res data but could easily be catered for - please feel free to try this code.


// Inspect IPN validation result and act accordingly
$valid_ipn = strstr($res, "VERIFIED");
if (!$valid_ipn) {
if (strstr($res, "INVALID")) {
$errorInfo = array("paypal_data" => $paypal_data, 'post_msg' => $post_msg, 'paypal_res' => $res);
$this->debugLog($errorInfo, vmText::_('VMPAYMENT_PAYPAL_ERROR_IPN_VALIDATION'), 'error', false);
} else {
$errorInfo = array('paypal_res' => $res);
$this->debugLog($errorInfo,vmText::_('VMPAYMENT_PAYPAL_ERROR_IPN_VALIDATION') . ": NO ANSWER FROM PAYPAL", 'validateIpnContent', 'error', false);
}
}

Regards
A

Joomla 3.10.11
php 8.0

clairemarie

I had a response from PayPal Support this morning asking for more information.
It took them 7 days to respond to the original query - I will await their answer.

We are now getting 3-4 of these a day.

clairemarie

PayPal did come back to me with a vague response - they clearly didn't read my question properly

"Upon checking in our internal system for the transaction id's you have sent, I see the transaction is success and IPN is success as well.  I don't see any issue in IPN and the transaction.

I would request you to double check, how you are updating in your application."


We have not had further errors this week so I will leave it for now.

AH

Thanks for the update - this can often be the case for PayPal - things suddenly "start working" when they dont answer for ages
Regards
A

Joomla 3.10.11
php 8.0

lostmail

Seems to be a paypal-Problem:

2019-07-18 12:53:38 ERROR validateIpnContent: Ungültige IPN Validierung: NO ANSWER FROM PAYPAL

Got the same error message and found the entry in Virtuemart / tools / protocol / paypal.2.log.php

I think it`s a one time problem...
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