Can anyone help me get started?

[MrYossu]

Sorry if I appear thick, but I've been banging my head on the screen for a few hours now trying to work out how to take a payment. I would be quite pathetically grateful if anyone could help me get started. I tried asking Claude, but after 14 (no kidding) code samples that didn't even compile, I've given up with it. I'd really like some human help on this.

I have a Blazor web app, although I imagine the code would be basically the same in Razor pages, and want to have a checkout page, where the user can see the amount they are to pay, enter their card details and pay via PayPal, without being redirected to the PayPal site. I would like to avoid JavaScript as much as possible, and use C# types in my code. Obviously, I don't want to capture the card details myself, I want to use HTML controls generated by PayPal.

From what I can see, the PayPal-Dotnet-Server-SDK looks like it should do the job, but the sample code shown isn't enough for me to piece together a full picture.

Anyone able to point me in the right direction? Thanks very much.

[MrYossu]

Forgot to mention that I did find this demo, where the FullStackPayPalDemo project looks like it does what I want, but it doesn't use any PayPal packages, instead relying on RestSharp and making the API calls manually. Not sure if that's the best way to do, given that PayPal supply an SDK.

More important, I don't see anywhere in that sample where the user can enter their card details.

Anyone able to comment? Thanks again.

[clee10]

Hey @MrYossu, have you tried checking out the official SDK docs? If you haven't, I suggest you give it a go as they have sample requests and responses that you can try for each of the endpoints.

[clee10]

Based on your explanation, I think the best option is to use JavaScript unfortunately as we do not support "pure" C#/.Net integration. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/javascript-interoperability/?view=aspnetcore-9.0 for more reference.

[MrYossu]

@clee10 Thanks for the link. Yes I did look at those, it's where I started, but it doesn't give enough to implement a solution. All the page does is show you how to create a PayPal client. Great, what do I do with it now? Even if you look further, say to the page that shows how to capture a payment, there isn't enough code to see what to do. No explanation of how you offer the controls to capture the card details, no indication of how to get the AuthorizationId that is shown in the sample code, and so on.

I'm sure it's obvious to people who are familiar with the API and the SDK, but as someone getting started, the documentation is totally lacking in useful information. A single-page tutorial showing how to set up a simple page that allows you to take a payment would have been soooo useful, but I can't see anything like that there.

Thanks again. If you have a link to anything that would give me enough clues as to how I set up the whole process I'd be really grateful.

[clee10]

Hey @MrYossu, thanks for explaining your situation. I understand that those pages may not contain enough information to get started and we appreciate your feedback as this is an early stage of our SDK, so we are interested to know more about what developers would expect from us.

I will let my team know more about this concern and consider creating a sample app in future releases. In the meantime, have you also looked at these integrations? They also use the Server SDKs and outline an example of PayPal integration. I suggest you first read the Get Started page if you aren't familiar with the logic behind PayPal checkout. This should help you at least create an order and capture it (or you can authorize it and then get the authoriztaion id from the response and capture authorized payment. From there, you can start implementing your own logic.

If you face any errors or bugs while setting these up, feel free to open a new issue. Let me know if those resources help you get started.

[MrYossu]

@clee10 Thanks for the reply. I did see some of those pages, but not all. Guess I've got some bedtime reading eh?

One quick question (not really to do with the SDK, but as I've got you I might as well ask), is it possible to do a checkout like you get with, say Stripe, where all the user needs to do is enter their card details, and a postcode/zip for security? From what I've seen, if someone doesn't have a PayPal account, checking out with a card still requires them to enter a lot more info, such as email, etc.

Thanks again

[clee10]

Hey @MrYossu, I'm not entirely aware of a flow where they'd require you to fill out info like emails even if the user doesn't have a PayPal account. It may ask for confirmation number in 3DS flow, but that should be the expected flow. As you mentioned this isn't particularly related to SDK, but I can advise you to implement a test page first with cards and then try one of the cards in https://developer.paypal.com/tools/sandbox/card-testing/ to test it out.

If you could show me a screenshot or some sort on this behavior, I might have a better idea.