Laravel 5 catching PayPal PHP API 400 errors on localhost:8000

Question

Using the PayPal API with my Laravel 5.2 install, specifically this package: https://github.com/anouarabdsslm/laravel-paypalpayment

The package works great! and I am taking payments perfectly! I am struggling to catch and redirect when incorrect details e.g. bank card details are entered by a user. The Laravel application just throws a 400 error.

What I am wanting to do is catch the errors and redirect back and notify the user.

The code below is where I make a request:

try {
    // ### Create Payment
    // Create a payment by posting to the APIService
    // using a valid ApiContext
    // The return object contains the status;

    $payment->create($this->_apiContext);

} catch (\PPConnectionException $ex) {
    return Redirect::back()->withErrors([$ex->getMessage() . PHP_EOL]);
}

dd($payment);

When a successful payment is made I get a nice return object that I can reference and action accordingly, when there is an issue like a 400 error it kills the application completely and DOES NOT catch and redirect the errors back to the user.

The error code messages are:

PayPalConnectionException in PayPalHttpConnection.php
Got Http response code 400 when accessing 
https://api.sandbox.paypal.com/v1/payments/payment.

Has anyone faced similar issues with the PayPal PHP API?

I know when the application isn't in dev mode I can have error pages specifically to catch certain error codes. But I really want to catch errors and redirect back to the form with notifications for the user.

Thanks in advance to any wizard who can help.

Answer 1

Right guys,

I posted the answer here: Laravel 5 catching 400 response from PayPal API but I want to make sure anyone hitting this thread knows how I solved the issue!

It would appear that Laravel's default Exception method was interfering with the PayPal API PayPalConnectionException. So I modified the code to catch general Exception errors only as it contained all required error objects. The \ before Exception was critical! as it needs the correct namespace (in my case anyway, your application may be different).

try {
    // ### Create Payment
    // Create a payment by posting to the APIService
    // using a valid ApiContext
    // The return object contains the status;
    $payment->create($this->_apiContext);

} catch (\Exception $ex) {
    return Redirect::back()->withErrors([$ex->getData()])->withInput(Input::all());
}

This link that @rchatburn posted was highly useful, the application always seemed to catch at the point \Exception and NOT \PayPalConnectionException once I had everything namespaced correctly.

In my investigations I came across app/Exceptions/Handler.php. Here you can extend the render method to grab a PayPalConnectionException and handle the errors uniquely to that specific exception . See code:

//Be sure to include the exception you want at the top of the file
use PayPal\Exception\PayPalConnectionException;//pull in paypal error exception to work with

public function render($request, Exception $e)
{
    //check the specific exception
    if ($e instanceof PayPalConnectionException) {
        //return with errors and with at the form data
        return Redirect::back()->withErrors($e->getData())->withInput(Input::all());
    }

    return parent::render($request, $e);
} 

Either work great, but for me it felt neater to just change the catch method to a lookout for a general Exception, where I am testing if a payment was successful.

Hope this helps anyone facing similar issues :D!!!

Nick.