I've been receiving IPNs for recurring donations. The IPNs include a field and I'm unable to find much information about that field from the PayPal documentation. I'm looking for information on the source of the field value, preferably from official documentation if it's available.
- I'm using PayPal Payments Standard. The donation form is my own HTML using the variables from the HTML Variables page (https://developer.paypal.com/docs/paypal-payments-standard/integration-guide/Appx-websitestandard-ht...) . The cmd field is set to the value _donations.
- The IPNs I'm receiving for recurring donations have a field called product_name. This field is not one of the fields sent on the HTML donation form.
- The "IPN and PDT Variables" page (https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api-basics/notifications/ipn/IPNandPDTVariables/) uses a circular description and I was not able to find how PayPal knows what value to put into this field. According to this page, the product_name field is only used for recurring payments (as opposed to one-time donations).
- From trial and error, it looks like the product_name field of the IPN is being populated from the item_name field of the HTML donations form. But I'm understandably concerned about relying on experimentation alone in the code for my IPN listener. I'd feel more secure being able to refer to PayPal documentation to know for sure.
Would anyone in the community know where the value of the IPN product_name field comes from and maybe be able to refer me to documentation where I can read up on the details?
