Study Guide

Name-Value Pair (NVP) API
Technical Details
5
56 March 2008 PayPal Certified Developer Program Study Guide
Request Format
Each NVP request consists of required and optional parameters and their values. Parameter
names are not case-sensitive. As shown in Table 5.2, this document uses UPPERCASE for
parameter names and divides the parameters into required security parameters and body
parameters.
In practice, concatenate all parameter names and URL-encoded values in a single string. After
the METHOD parameter, the parameters can be specified in any order.
Required Security Parameters
The required security parameters are the same as the developer’s PayPal API credentials,
which are described in “API Credentials” on page 47.
API Parameters
The request body must contain the name of the API method in the METHOD parameter. In
addition, each method has required and optional parameters:
METHOD=methodName&requiredAndOptionalParameters
All API methods and their parameters are detailed in PayPal Name-Value Pair API Developer
Guide and Reference.
TABLE 5.2 General Format of a Request
Required security
parameters
USER=apiUsername&PWD=apiPassword&SIGNATURE=apiSignature&
SUBJECT=optionalThirdPartyEmailAddress&VERSION=3.3
The following parameters are always required:
z USER
z PWD
z VERSION=3.3
z SIGNATURE
N OTE: In the examples in this and other PayPal documents, the required security parameters
sometimes appear like this:
[requiredSecurityParameters]
Body parameters &METHOD=methodName&otherRequiredAndOptionalParameters