Donation API Testing

JeremyGP :

Other processors have a test mode, where the test numbers return approve responses. If there is no way to do this, how can we be sure our API applications are working properly?

You can run the donation API in preview mode by specifying the argument df_preview=true in the POST arguments.

Robert Zakon:

What does this mean? Is this a new feature? Can fake credit card numbers be used? How will responses be different?

It is a previously undocumented feature, not a new one. You can use fake card numbers (4111 1111 1111 1111). All of the same validations are performed for required fields, etc. but the transaction is not passed to the payment processor and no updates are applied to the database. The responses that you get from the API are identical in the case of errors and for successes are identical to what you would get if a live transaction were processed except that some of the fields will have dummy values:

<donationResponse xsi:schemaLocation="http://convio.com/crm/v1.0 " xmlns="http://convio.com/crm/v1.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">

<donation>

<amount>

<decimal>120.00</decimal>

<formatted>$120.00</formatted>

</amount>

<tax_deductible_amount>

<decimal>0.00</decimal>

<formatted>$0.00</formatted>

</tax_deductible_amount>

<value_of_goods>

<decimal>0.00</decimal>

<formatted>$0.00</formatted>

</value_of_goods>

<confirmation_code xsi:nil="true"/> <!-- would have data with a real transaction -->

<date_time>1969-12-31T18:00:00.000-06:00</date_time> <!-- would have data with a real transaction --> <transaction_id>0</transaction_id> <!-- would have data with a real transaction --> <org_tax_id>fake tax id : 123456-789</org_tax_id>

</donation>

</donationResponse>

You can run the donation API in preview mode by specifying the argument df_preview=true in the POST arguments.

Last time I used this any appearance of df_preview in the args tripped the form into test mode. (Df_preview=false did not disable it.)