Stripe: handle the first subscription and webhook event

Question

1. My customer join a our subscripton plan at the first time, I create a transaction (called START-transaction) and use Stripe's API to create new subscription and store subscription object return within above transaction.

2. I also using webhook to catch Stripe's events. My bigest purpose is handle recurring payment (send notification on charge success or fail, and something for customer's interaction). I catch event invoice.payment_succeeded to detect it's a recuring billing. I create a transaction too (call RECURRENCE) and, of couse, I store event object within transaction. (base on subscription information in event invoice.payment_succceeded, I find out relative-START transaction and create a new transaction as long as RECURRENCE)

And the problem exposes, in the first time customer creates plan, there 6 event called back to my system: customer.created; charge.succeeded; invoice.created; invoice.payment_succeeded; customer.card.created; customer.subscription.created. So, my customer have 2-transactiona: 1-START and 1-RECURRENCE at the first time.

Do you suggest me any idea to remove RECURRENCE transaction?

Thank you.

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to be able to tell if the invoice.payment_succeeded event you receive is for the first payment (which you already processed in your "START transaction") or not (in which case you want to process it in a "RECURRENCE transaction").

The simplest way to do this is to look at the event object's request attribute. Because the first invoice is a direct consequence of your subscription creation request, the first invoice.payment_succeeded event will have a non-null value for the request attribute. Subsequent invoices are created in the background by Stripe, and so the events will have a null value for the request attribute.

Answer 2

You can use the Stripe Request's billing_reason to identify if it is a first-time subscription, a recurring payment, or an updated invoice payment. See https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/object#invoice_object-billing_reason