Telegram Payment 2.0 API: How do I work around with this with answerShippingQuery and answerPreCheckoutQuery?

Question

With the 26th April update on Telegram introducing the Payments 2.0 feature along with other minor features, I’ve decided to build a Telegram bot that included these features. However, since this is a recent update with limited example documentation (and the syntax can take a while to digest), I was stuck implementing the Payment 2.0 feature and wanted to ask anyone who has done this (or is experienced in this verse) on a few matters:

• In answering shipping / pre-checkout queries (answerShippingQuery, answerPreCheckoutQuery), I understand that the API will send an Update with the field to the bot for it to respond properly. However, I am not too sure how to approach this after creating the invoice given the parameters and arguments and would love to understand some form of a “code snippet” to understand how the processes work (or do I have to use an asynchronous function?).

  def command TelegramShop(update: Update, _: CallbackContext):
      user = update.message.from_user
  
      Product = telegram.LabeledPrice("Demostration Product", 1000)
      ShippingMethod_1 = telegram.LabeledPrice("Self Collection", 0)
      ShippingMethod_2 = telegram.LabeledPrice("Mail In Delivery", 100)
      ShippingMethod_3= telegram.LabeledPrice("Tracked Mail In Delivery", 250)
      print("Hello")
      _.bot.sendInvoice(chat_id = user.id, title = "Demostration Product", description = "This box demostration does wonders!", payload = "productpayload", provider_token = "TOKEN", currency = "USD", prices = [Product], need_phone_number = True, need_email = True, need_shipping_address = True, send_phone_number_to_provider = True, send_email_to_provider = True, is_flexible = True)
      # Unsure how to add this answering of shipping query into the Telegram Bot.
      _.bot.answerShippingQuery(shipping_query_id = "swiftboxA", ok = False, error_message = "sorry, this does not work!")
  

• There are numerous identifiers within Payment API 2.0 ranging from shipping_query_id, pre_checkout_query_id and even payment identifiers such as telegram_payment_charge_id and provider_payment_charge_id. How do I go about obtaining these identifiers and for the payment identifiers, is there an appropriate code snippet illustrating their use?

Answer 1

TBH I haven't worked with payments much so far, but regarding "limited expample documentation" I would like to point you to

• a step-by-step guide in the official Telegram Bot API docs
• an example on payments provided by python-telegram-bot

If you have already seen these (which wasn't clear to my from your question), please just ignore my answer.

Also a side note: You should rename the second parameter from _ to context. The underscore is just a convention for unused parameters, but you apparently want to use it ;)

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Disclaimer: I'm currently the maitainer of python-telegram-bot.