Stripe: handle the first subscription and webhook event

Question

1. My customer join a our subscripton plan at the first time, I create a transaction (called START-transaction) and use Stripe's API to create new subscription and store subscription object return within above transaction.

2. I also using webhook to catch Stripe's events. My bigest purpose is handle recurring payment (send notification on charge success or fail, and something for customer's interaction). I catch event invoice.payment_succeeded to detect it's a recuring billing. I create a transaction too (call RECURRENCE) and, of couse, I store event object within transaction. (base on subscription information in event invoice.payment_succceeded, I find out relative-START transaction and create a new transaction as long as RECURRENCE)

And the problem exposes, in the first time customer creates plan, there 6 event called back to my system: customer.created; charge.succeeded; invoice.created; invoice.payment_succeeded; customer.card.created; customer.subscription.created. So, my customer have 2-transactiona: 1-START and 1-RECURRENCE at the first time.

Do you suggest me any idea to remove RECURRENCE transaction?

Thank you.

Freberg

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to be able to tell if the invoice.payment_succeeded event you receive is for the first payment (which you already processed in your "START transaction") or not (in which case you want to process it in a "RECURRENCE transaction").

The simplest way to do this is to look at the event object's request attribute. Because the first invoice is a direct consequence of your subscription creation request, the first invoice.payment_succeeded event will have a non-null value for the request attribute. Subsequent invoices are created in the background by Stripe, and so the events will have a null value for the request attribute.

Eanore

OMG, is it so simple???? You give light for my life, ha ha. I'm testing. Thank you. – Freberg

Glad I could help! :) – Eanore

This can be dangerous, because the request attribute may also be set for recurring events. For example, if someone clicks the "Pay now" button from stripe's dashboard on a recurring invoice page, the request attribute will be set. – Falstaffian

@Falstaffian Clicking the "Pay now" button is the same thing as calling stripe.com/docs/api#pay_invoice, i.e. you're manually triggering the payment for the invoice. In both cases, the request attribute would have a non-null value since it's a manual request. You can check the request attribute for the invoice.created event if you want to check whether the invoice was created (not paid) as part of an ongoing subscription. – Eanore

So maybe billing_reason is the best to cover all cases? – Mielke

Answer 2

You can use the Stripe Request's billing_reason to identify if it is a first-time subscription, a recurring payment, or an updated invoice payment. See https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/object#invoice_object-billing_reason

Suet