How can I avoid auth and time issues using Paypal's Adaptive Payments API with Ruby?

Question

I'm running into multiple issues trying to access Paypal's Adaptive Payment API from Ruby.

The main issue I ran into initially was that Paypal requires their HTTP headers to be in all caps but Net::HTTP does not preserve the case of HTTP headers (it stores them 'downcased' and then outputs them 'capitalized' -- so if you set the header 'X-PAYPAL-SECURITY-USERID' it is stored as 'x-paypal-security-userid' and output as 'X-Paypal-Security-Userid').

I was getting "500000 Internal Server" errors when I tried to use the API with these mis-cased headers.

So I monkeypatched Net::HTTP to preserve the case of the headers. But now I am getting timeout exceptions:

Timeout::Error (execution expired):
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:60:in `rbuf_fill'
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/protocol.rb:132:in `rbuf_fill'
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/protocol.rb:104:in `read_all'
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:2220:in `read_body_0'
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:2173:in `read_body'
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:2198:in `body'
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:2137:in `reading_body'
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:1052:in `request'
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:543:in `start'

So, back to my original question: Is anyone successfully accessing the adaptive payments API using Ruby? If so, what's your secret?

Answer 1

I created a paypal adaptive payments gem for ruby. I'm using it successfully at nextsprocket.com

Here's a blog post about it: http://tommy.chheng.com/index.php/2009/12/paypal-adaptive-ruby-gem-released/

Give it a shot and see if it will help you.