Why Paypal don`t return custom field via a webhooks for recurring payments?
With a request to paypal, we send custom fields "order_id" to identify the payment, but for recurring payments we don`t receive “order_id” field in the response.
In IPN history I see this cutoms field, but why i don`t see in webhook?
I can't explain "why" but I can tell you that the Custom Field is not populated for recurring payments in the transaction search API results OR the reports they generate for retrieval from their SFTP server. When I first opened a case with PayPal on 7/20/2020 they acknowledged that the transaction search API exhibited this bug and suggested I sign up to download daily reports from their SFTP server instead, but that didn't help! When I pushed on this some more, I was told I was only the second person to report the problem (implying that it wasn't important enough to fix). The irony is that the custom field is correctly populated for recurring payments when you generate a transaction report manually through the website and download the CSV.
In my application, users may use separate emails for the app and Paypal. Also, people may have the same names. If I can't create a custom webhook field, how do I know which user to send the recurring digital goods?
We still use Instant Payment Notifications which has the custom field properly populated for both single and recurring payments. We haven't used webhooks so far. It is only in PayPal reports via the API or SFTP server that we've found the custom fields blank for recurring payments. They are correct on the manually generated activity reports. As an ultimate fallback, you could always embed the order ID in an item name and extract it from there in your webhook.
