Support

August 24, 2018 at 7:44 am

Here’s what Authorize.net says: The errors are generally caused by special characters, with the information you’ve provided there are many special characters listed in the item ID field, can you make sure those are not being passed to us?

August 24, 2018 at 8:38 am

I can’t remember if it was pasted in originally, but I’ve just gone back and re-entered the ticket title manually, making sure there were no extra spaces or characters, and it failed with the same error again. I have a number of questions here, but almost zero answers.
1) When they say “special characters” are they referring to the URL encoding?
2) Do the EE logs print the actual request as it was sent to Anet, or a URLencoded version of the request?
3) Other tickets are transacting fine and seem to have the same encoding, although I haven’t gone through the effort of decoding them…
4) What are the <|> bits in the decoded string from my earlier message? Is it supposed to be a pipe separator? If so, why do they have brackets?
5) Do you or Authorize.net have some way of validating requests?
6) Why is it so hard to find documentation from Anet about what is a VALID line item or what is considered a special character?

August 24, 2018 at 10:28 am

OK, I’ve got a major update here. After talking to my 5th Authorize.net representative, I found out that NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS are supposed to be in the line item, even though their documentation just says “String, up to 31 characters”.

Unfortunately, the way Event Espresso builds the line item titles and descriptions is the reason for the Reason Code 270, but you wouldn’t know that based on their documentation. Here’s what is happening.

Our event is called “Reason’s 50th Anniversary” (note the apostrophe). When we sell our Early Bird Individual Ticket, here’s an example of the URLdecoded string that gets sent to Anet as the line item:
1<|>Early Bird Individual Ticket fo<|><ul> <li>Reason Panels and Speakers (lunch included) on Nov. 3</li> <li>50th Anniversary Gala on Nov. 3</li> </ul> (For Reason�s 50th Anniversary Gala)<|>2.00<|>500.00<|>N

When we sell our Student Ticket, here’s what the line item looks like:
`1<|>Student Ticket for Reason�s 5<|><ul>
<li>Reason Panels and Speakers (lunch included) on Nov. 3</li>
<li>50th Anniversary Gala on Nov. 3</li>
</ul> (For Reason�s 50th Anniversary Gala)<|>1.00<|>250.00<|>N`

Notice, in the second block, the ticket title is short, so it concatenates the event title. But the event title contains an apostrophe. THIS is what is causing the failure. The apostrophe is apparently not allowed in the Line Item Title, but is allowed in the description (although it get’s pretty mangled on their end).

There are a few things EE should do to fix the Authorize integration.
1) All line item fields should be stripped of all non-alphanumeric characters before sending to Anet. These values are passed along in a non-HTML-friendly way to the customers in receipt emails, so the customer literally sees all the mangled characters and HTML tags in their receipts 🙁
2) If you’re going to strip HTML from descriptions, it would probably be good to let clients know that HTML isn’t valid in that field, or figure out some way to parse basic HTML tags to a no-special-characters string for receipt purposes.
3) Maybe stop concatenating the event title to the ticket title in the case of short ticket titles, since the event title is already being included in the description field. Seems redundant and created this weird bug that sent me on a 72-hour back-and-forth between you guys and Anet.

I look forward to hopefully seeing the patch for this released soon. In the meantime, if anyone else has this issue, the solution is A) to remove special characters from your ticket titles AND event titles or B) remove special characters from your ticket titles and make the ticket titles long enough that any special characters from the event title don’t get concatenated. I solved this by changing “Student Ticket” to “Student Discount Ticket” hahahahaha.