How to access 3rd party transaction information in Paypal - paypal

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to access transaction information from a third party user (to include in a dashboard) from Paypal.
Ideally I need to be able to pull in transaction data, without having to manually authorize the app everytime, as a lot of it needs to happen in the background. So far using a test account, I can see how I could obtain the API username, password and signature which I guess I would need to use.
Which API would I use for this (Classic / Rest) and which method of authentication would be safest?

Answer 1

After struggling with this for sometime I found a simple, but crude implementation here - List of PayPal transactions.
The original code didn't work - here's a corrected version
<?php
$info = 'USER=[API_USERNAME]'
.'&PWD=[API_PASSWORD]'
.'&SIGNATURE=[API_SIGNATURE]'
.'&METHOD=TransactionSearch'
.'&TRANSACTIONCLASS=RECEIVED'
.'&STARTDATE=2013-01-08T05:38:48Z'
.'&ENDDATE=2013-07-14T05:38:48Z'
.'&VERSION=94';
$curl = curl_init('https://api-3t.paypal.com/nvp');
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $info);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
$result = curl_exec($curl);
# Bust the string up into an array by the ampersand (&)
# You could also use parse_str(), but it would most likely limit out
$result = explode("&", $result);
# Loop through the new array and further bust up each element by the equal sign (=)
# and then create a new array with the left side of the equal sign as the key and the right side of the equal sign as the value
foreach($result as $value){
$value = explode("=", $value);
$temp[$value[0]] = $value[1];
}
for($i=0; $i<(count($temp)/11)-1; $i++){
$returned_array[$i] = array(
"timestamp" => urldecode($temp["L_TIMESTAMP".$i]),
"timezone" => urldecode($temp["L_TIMEZONE".$i]),
"type" => urldecode($temp["L_TYPE".$i]),
"email" => urldecode($temp["L_EMAIL".$i]),
"name" => urldecode($temp["L_NAME".$i]),
"transaction_id" => urldecode($temp["L_TRANSACTIONID".$i]),
"status" => urldecode($temp["L_STATUS".$i]),
"amt" => urldecode($temp["L_AMT".$i]),
"currency_code" => urldecode($temp["L_CURRENCYCODE".$i]),
"fee_amount" => urldecode($temp["L_FEEAMT".$i]),
"net_amount" => urldecode($temp["L_NETAMT".$i]));
}
var_dump($returned_array);
This is obviously not production code, but it's good enough to work backwards from.