My requirement is that i need to use a Hosted (uk) solution to generate a reference transaction token that can then be called periodically without the user having to initiate the transaction again.
Currently, using the classic API I have something akin to a reference transaction working, however this requires the user to have a PayPal account - I also need to be able to accept card details (no PayPal account).
The only way to accept card details seems to be with the hosted (uk) solution however I have no idea how to set this up. So, I guess the questions are this:
1) Am I able to allow card AND PayPal account for the reference transactions?
or
2) How do I setup / configure a hosted solution? or is this simply a case of using the docs and an iframe with no config in the PayPal account?
As @DiceyRamp has stated the hosted solution is just a case of using the docs, no account specific setup is required.
To answer the first question :- it is NOT possible to use the PayPal Hosted API for Reference Transactions. You instead must use the Button API to create a reference token. In order to generate a token without a purchase you must go one further, generate an order and then immediately void it.
Credit where credit is due, this was answered for me over email by another developer. Im including his explanation here in the hope that it helps others.
The specific process is this:
We create an iframe url using the PayPal BMCreateButton method, with the BUTTONTYPE set to “PAYMENT” and the BUTTONCODE as “TOKEN”. We then set all the usual order parameters up (name, address, notify_url etc) and then url encode them. We then execute the BMCreateButton with the above arguments set, this gives us an iframe url which we render on the page.
To generate a token we use a dummy £1 order.
The code that executes on the “notify_url” basically takes the IPN message, and if the result is ‘VERIFIED’ then it stores the ‘txn_id’ as the token.
This can then be used later on a Paypal DoReferenceTransaction API call, using the txn_id as the “REFERENCEID” parameter. The notify_url code will NOT store the txn_id if the IPN states the order was a VOID, you can’t do a repeat against a void, so we never store the void txn_id as a token.