Joomla’s RSForm Pro PayPal Plugin Not Changing the Payment Status from “Pending” to “Accepted”

RSForm Pro is one of the most powerful extensions out there. You can create any type of form with it, and associate any action you can think of when the form is submitted, whether through plugins or through embedded PHP code. This makes RSForm ideal for integrating Joomla with payment gateways (such as Authorize, PayPal, and Stripe) and marketing tools (such as HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, and the likes).

But, hiccups are bound to happen from time to time, and we experienced a small hiccup with our last RSForm Pro integration. Here’s what happened…

A client of ours commissioned us to create a “gift card” page on their website, where people can purchase gift cards that are used towards subscriptions (the subscription system used was Akeeba Subscriptions – the gift cards are actually coupons in Akeeba Subscriptions). We used RSForm Pro for that, and we added 2 payment methods: PayPal and Stripe. The gift card process went as follows:

  • The client visits the page containing the form, which asks the client about his name, his email, the type of gift card that he wants to purchase ($50 gift card or $100 gift card), and his payment method (credit card or PayPal).

  • Based on the client’s choice of payment method, the system will either display a popup asking for the client’s credit card details or will redirect the client to PayPal.

  • When the payment is processed, the Stripe plugin and the PayPal plugin will trigger the rsfp_afterConfirmPayment event, which is implemented in the RSForm Payment Success plugin (which we developed). The RSForm Payment Success plugin will generate the coupon code on the Akeeba Subscriptions system, and will send the coupon code to the client.

  • The client is then redirected to a page displaying the coupon code (essentially a page containing the same information that was sent to the client in the email).

There was, however, two small problems in the process above: the payment status was not changed to “Accepted” (from “Pending”) and the rsfp_afterConfirmPayment event was not being triggered when the payment was completed through PayPal, which was odd, considering that, unlike the Stripe plugin, this plugin was not a 3rd party plugin.

Naturally, the first thing that we checked was whether the notify_url was correct, and it was. Luckily, while checking that, we noticed that the PayPal RSForm plugin was logging everything to a file named rsformpro_paypal_log.php in the logs folder, and so we immediately checked that file, which contained the following (very helpful) information:

2017-05-23 23:28:26 : IPN received from PayPal
2017-05-23 23:28:26 : Connecting to https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr to verify if PayPal response is valid.
2017-05-23 23:28:26 : PayPal reported a valid transaction.
2017-05-23 23:28:26 : Check the order's amount paid: 50.00 - 50.00. Payment amount is correct.
2017-05-23 23:28:26 : Validation failed -> The email address is not correct - [email-address]

As you can see, the last line is saying that the email address is incorrect, but it was. So, we searched for the code that was throwing this error, and it was the following code in the file rsfppaypal.php which is located under the plugins/system/rsfppaypal folder: 

if (RSFormProHelper::getConfig('paypal.email') !== $validation_fields['receiver_email'])
{
	$array['error']  = true;
	$array['reason'] = sprintf('The email address is not correct - %s', $validation_fields['receiver_email']);

	return $array;
}

At first glance, nothing seemed to be wrong with the above code, but, on closer examination, we discovered a subtle bug: what if the email set in the configuration is not exactly the same as the email sent back from PayPal, what if, for example, the email set in the RSForm configuration is something like myemail@myjoomlatestwebsite.com and the PayPal email is something like MyEmail@myjoomlatestwebsite.com – in that case, the condition (in the first line) will return true, and an error will be returned by the PayPal plugin (which will halt the completion of the PayPal transaction from RSForm’s end). So, we changed the above code to the following…

if (strtolower(RSFormProHelper::getConfig('paypal.email')) !== strtolower($validation_fields['receiver_email']))
{
	$array['error']  = true;
	$array['reason'] = sprintf('The email address is not correct - %s', $validation_fields['receiver_email']);

	return $array;
}

…and then we tested the form again, and this time, it worked. The payment status was changed to “Accepted” and the rsfp_afterConfirmPayment event was finally triggered on successful PayPal payments. Phew!

Now if you, our dear reader, have problems with PayPal transactions still set to “Pending” (instead of “Accepted”) in your RSForm Pro form submissions even though these transactions were successful, then it might be that the email in the configuration settings of RSForm Pro does not exactly match that in PayPal. You can either ensure that both emails are exactly the same (e.g. they have the same casing), or modify the RSForm Pro PayPal as described above. If you need help with the implementation, or if that doesn’t solve your problem, then please contact us. Our prices are super affordable, our work is super clean, and our turnover is super quick!

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