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Hi!

If I have a product with variation (in my case the customer specifies an url), the notification url gets called as many times as many variations are there.

In each call, the data contains the information on ALL variations.

Example: custoemer specifies two domains, the cart looks like this:
3D Rotate EZ (website: www.example.com)
3D Rotate EZ (website: www.example2.com)

my notifcication url gets called TWO times, in each call there are data on BOTH variations.

Question: Why is this REDUNDANCY necessary? Its confusing for the developer. Only after a hour I figured out that the second call has the item_cart_position->2 value set to :2".

I assume if I store the variations in my db only from the first call, it is safe to ignore the other calls (the one who have item_cart_position higher than 1), right?

Can anyone confirm that this behaviour won't change in the future?

Thanks!

If you only want to send the full order data once per order, use your Common Notification URL setting (in Seller Admin > Account Preferences) rather than any product-specific Payment Variable Information URLs (when you enable "Send transaction data to a URL" in the product's settings).

The Common Notification URL setting was added to our system relatively recently; previously, the product-specific setting was the only way to pass order data to an outside URL. Our Integration submissions were intended to mimic the format and dataset of a PayPal IPN as closely and completely as possible, so we include all the order data by default, which developers can choose to parse down if they don't need to keep or use everything. "Too much is always better than not enough."

The 'item_cart_position' variable indicates which item in the order triggered a product-specific data submission, so e.g. if the second item the buyer added to their cart happened to have "Send transaction data to a URL" enabled, then our submission for that item would include item_cart_position=2, so you can tell that corresponds to the values for 'item_name2', 'item_number2', etc. pertaining to that particular product.

The current behavior is not likely to change in the foreseeable future.

Thanks for your helpful answer.

Kind Regards,
Matus.