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Ebook Internet Payment Gateway Integration Guide First Data API

Submitted by wulan on Sat, 11/14/2009 - 03:45

The First Data API is an Application Programming Interface which allows you to connect your application with the First Data Internet Payment Gateway. In this way, your application is able to submit credit card transactions without any user interference.

Please note that if you store or process cardholder data within your own application, you must ensure that your system components are compliant with the Data Security Standard of the Payment Card Industry (PCI DSS). Depending on your transaction volume, an assessment by a Qualified Security Assessor may be mandatory to declare your compliance status.

From a technical point of view, the First Data API is a Web Service offering one remote operation for performing transactions. The three core advantages of this design can be summarized as follows:

  • Platform independence: Communicating with the First Data API Web Service means that your application must only be capable of sending and receiving SOAP messages. There are no requirements tied to a specific platform, since the Web Service technology builds on a set of open standards. In short, you are free to choose any technology you want (e.g. J2EE, .NET, PHP, ASP, etc.) for making your application capable of communicating with the First Data API Web Service.
  • Easy integration: Communicating with a Web Service is simple – your application has to build a SOAP request message encoding your transaction, send it via HTTPS to the Web Service and wait for a SOAP response message which contains your transaction’s status report. Since SOAP and HTTP are designed to be lightweight protocols, building requests and responses becomes a straightforward task. Furthermore, you rarely have to do this manually, since there are plenty of libraries available in almost every technology. In general, building a SOAP request and handling the response is reduced to a few lines of code.
  • Security: All communication between your application and First Data API is SSL-encrypted. This is established by your application holding a client certificate which identifies it uniquely at the Web Service. In the same way, the First Data API holds a server certificate which your application may check for making sure that it speaks to the API Web Service. Finally, your application has to do a basic authorization (user name / password) before being allowed to communicate with the Web Service. In this way, the users who are authorized to communicate with First Data API are identified. These two security mechanisms guarantee that the transaction data sent to First Data API both stays private and is identified as transaction data that your application has committed and belongs to no one else.

While this represents just a short summary of First Data API’s features, the focus of this guide lies on integrating the First Data API functionality into your application. A detailed description, explaining how this is done step by step, is presented in this guide. The first chapter describes all the supported transaction types.

Contents

1 Introduction
2 Artefacts You Need
3 How the API works
4 Sending transactions to the gateway
5 Building Transactions in XML

    5.1 Credit Card transactions
      5.1.1 Sale
      5.1.2 PreAuth
      5.1.3 PostAuth
      5.1.4 ForceTicket
      5.1.5 Return
      5.1.6 Credit
      5.1.7 Void

    5.2 UK Debit

      5.2.1 Sale
      5.2.2 Return
      5.2.3 Credit
      5.2.4 Void

    5.3 German Direct Debit

      5.3.1 Sale
      5.3.2 Void

6 Additional Web Service actions

    6.1 Initiate Clearing
    6.2 Inquiry Order
    6.3 Recurring Payments

7 Data Vault
8 XML-Tag overview

    8.1 Overview by transaction type
    8.2 Description of the XML-Tags
      8.2.1 CreditCardTxType
      8.2.2 CreditCardData
      8.2.3 CreditCard3DSecure
      8.2.4 DE_DirectDebitTxType
      8.2.5 DE_DirectDebitData
      8.2.6 Payment
      8.2.7 TransactionDetails
      8.2.8 Billing
      8.2.9 Shipping

9 Building a SOAP Request Message
10 Reading the SOAP Response Message

    10.1 SOAP Response Message
    10.2 SOAP Fault Message
      10.2.1 SOAP-ENV:Server
      10.2.2 SOAP-ENV:Client

11 Analysing the Transaction Result

    11.1 Transaction Approval
    11.2 Transaction Failure

12 Building an HTTPS POST Request

    12.1 PHP
      12.1.1 Using the cURL PHP Extension
      12.1.2 Using the cURL Command Line Tool

    12.2 ASP

13 Establishing an SSL connection

    13.1 PHP
      13.1.1 Using the PHP cURL Extension
      13.1.2 Using the cURL Command Line Tool

    13.2 ASP

14 Sending the HTTPS POST Request and Receiving the Response

    14.1 PHP
      14.1.1 Using the PHP cURL Extension
      14.1.2 Using the cURL Command Line Tool

    14.2 ASP

15 Using a Java Client to connect to the web service

    15.1 Instance an IPGApiClient
    15.2 How to construct a transaction and handle the response
    15.3 How to construct an action
    15.4 How to connect behind a proxy

Appendix
ipgapi.xsd
v1.xsd
a1.xsd

    Troubleshooting - Merchant Exceptions
    Troubleshooting - Processing Exceptions
    Troubleshooting - Login error messages when using cURL
    Troubleshooting - Login error messages when using the Java Client

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