I have done a lot of work with PayPal's api over the years, and one of the biggest frustrations I had for a long time was that their ColdFusion support was limited. In the more recent versions of their API they have provided the ColdFusion development community with a CFC that interfaces with their Java API.

Then, when they dropped the requirement for a client-side .P12 certificate to be passed with each request as the only way to authenticate against their api, and added the option to use a signature string instead, they got close to a useful solution for the average CF developer.

The only thing that still causes many ColdFusion people to cringe and pull their hair out, is the fact that the PayPal.cfc returns a java object, which is something most CF developers don't deal with on a regular basis (if at all).

Fortunately for you, I have already taken the time to go through each of the API calls, and through the use of many cfdumps, I found every piece of information available in each of the responses, and then I put them into nice CF developer friendly ColdFusion structures.

When you invoke the API functions using my version of the PayPal.cfc file you will be able to do a single cfdump on the returnvariable and there you will see all the information returned by the API in one glance.

No longer will you have to things like this to get to get variables deep within the response object:

Now you will be able to access the same information like this:

Download the Code

Once you download the code, you will need to modify the PPInitialize function so that it uses your api signature and login credentials. There is also a cfm file that contains a sample of how to invoke each of the API functions.