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I am actually unsure about the reason why it is closed — in any case, I do not understand how the "being a question about developing a web application" applies here: the forum is about web apps, so every question always relates to developing a web application; I emphasize that I am asking about one specific detail about the web application (connecting the paypal button to my setup), as opposed to just giving a set of specifications on what I need and expecting the forum to develop a system for me.

Perhaps it was not very clear that the actual question was: Could someone point me to some examples of the concrete code that one has to generate for the thing to work?. Seems to me like a very concrete question with very concrete answers (even if many possible of them). Maybe part of the problem is that I added that at the bottom, after all the details, making it sound like those details are just specifications so that people can design a system for me?

In my mind, I'm asking a specific question, but the sort of "chicken or the egg" problem I'm having is that I cannot come up with a web app that I wrote that is missing some pieces to ask about those pieces because I don't even understand the scheme as Paypal explains it; so, it is kind of I need to first see an answer (see the pieces in action to then adapt it to my application) to be able to formulate the question in the very specific format of "here's the system, this detail is not working, can someone see why?".

Perhaps an alternative to turn it into a valid question could be to rephrase the "the way it work is...." and phrase it as "this is what we have", so that it doesn't sound like those are part of specifications that need to be used to develop a complete web application?

I will highly appreciate any additional comments to help me understand why this question is not welcome in this forum, and I hope I will be able to rephrase it to turn it into a valid/accepted question.


Original question:

I've been trying to add a Paypal payment button to our site. I find Paypal's documentation extremely poor and useless (I admit that I have very little experience with any modern web development techniques, so that may be part of why I can't understand their documentation).

From our perspective, the way it works is:

  • We sell a yearly subscription for a service
  • Our database has a UserID (an integer value) for each user
  • Our users log in and then go to a section "Subscribe", where we allow them to select 1, 2, or 3-year subscription
  • From there, we would want the user to go to the Paypal payment form.

What I picture in terms of processing (on our side) could be something like:

  • Once the user completes all the steps, we could create an entry in one of our tables (say, customer_payment) where we put a unique paymentID value and all the related information — UserID and number of years they want to pay for).
  • When Paypal tells us (I suppose via a callback in the JavaScript code?) that the payment was successfully completed, we need to be able to associate that callback to the paymentID that is related to that action, and the rest is entirely on our side.

Could someone point me to some examples of the concrete code that one has to generate for the thing to work? Paypal examples show little bits and pieces, but I am clueless about (1) how to connect and how those pieces work together; and (2) they are particularly unclear on what is supposed to be there literally as the example shows, and what is supposed to refer to some data that one fills in.

BTW, we already have a Paypal account (for now, we've been using the Paypal invoices as a temporary mechanism for the payments).

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  • I migrated the question from the main site to meta because the "edit" is asking about the scope of this site. It was set at the beginning, so it looks to be more important than the original question.
    – Rubén Mod
    Jan 10, 2021 at 15:44

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From the question

...is about web apps, so every question always relates to developing a web application;

In few words, Web Applications is about using web applications as an end-user.

Perhaps it was not very clear that the actual question was: Could someone point me to some examples of the concrete code that one has to generate for the thing to work?.

Questions asking for external resources are not a good fit either because they tend to be subjective questions were every answer might be equal valid. It's worthy to note that on SE there are very few technical sites that allow this, one of them is Software Recommendations.

Here you might ask how to use a website like https://www.paypal.com/buttons/

Reference

Related

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    Holy cow!!! I never ever would have guessed that the forum is about using web applications as an end-user ... That seems very un-stackexchange (where things tend to be about the technical/programming side ― for the software-related forums, of course). I read the comment and I understood it like my question was just a set of specifications asking the forum to design a web app for me (which is obvious to me that it is unacceptable). Anyway, thanks for the clarification and the links!
    – Cal-linux
    Jan 10, 2021 at 18:46
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    Oh, and BTW, you almost answered my original question :‒) (the link ppal.com/buttons is actually more useful than any of the other pages I had seen under paypal !!!)
    – Cal-linux
    Jan 10, 2021 at 18:49

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