Fail-proof result notification (FPRN) is a service that provides additional assurance that the merchant website will receive notification regarding the outcome of transactions completed via the Payment Express hosted payment page.
FPRN helps cater for the possibility that a user may not successfully navigate to the nominated success or failure URL enabling the merchant web application to acknowledge the outcome of the transaction. The user could close their browser or otherwise navigate away from the Payment Express hosted payment page once they have been informed of the transaction outcome. The merchant's web server may be temporarily unavailable as the transaction is completed and therefore unable to recognise that a transaction has taken place. Using the FPRN service the merchant website is virtually guaranteed to receive notification of the each and every transaction.
FPRN is highly recommended by Payment Express and is enabled on all new accounts by default. The service ensures that the following processes occur for every transaction performed via hosted payment page:
As soon as the transaction is completed, a background process at Payment Express makes an HTTP GET request to the merchant-nominated success or failure URL. If the merchant web site is unreachable or returns any HTTP status code other than 200 or 404 the HTTP GET is retried up to a maximum of six times. It will give up immediately on receiving a 404 HTTP status code (page not found). A 500 HTTP status code, indicating a temporary problem at the client site, will cause a retry.
In order to ensure that the web application is in the best position to acknowledge the outcome of each and every transaction certain guidelines should be followed.
The merchant web application should not;
Filter or base any conditional logic upon the originating IP address (this can vary)
Depend upon receiving one and only one request for the success/fail URL from the Payment Express FPRN system (multiple requests may be sent)
The merchant web application should;
Decrypt the query string for all requests for a success/fail page requests where the requested URL contains a 'result' parameter containing the encrypted transaction outcome details
Determine if a database operation or some form of communication such as generating an order record or sending an email is required. Generally this will mean that the application needs to be aware if these actions have been taken previously for the particular transaction or not (TxnId should be used for this purpose).
N.B. The URL at which the merchant website will process FPRN requests must be exposed via standard internet ports i.e. port 80 or port 443 for SSL/TLS traffic. When specifying UrlSuccess and UrlFail values do not specify a non-standard port number within the URL.