How to migrate pre-existing PayPal recurring into Civi?

[mdlueck]

Our organization has recurring PayPal charges for site members. How do we get Civi receiving the ack back from PayPal and for Civi to match up the ack with the correct member?

Must we drop the recurring charge in the PayPal website and have Civi submit a brand new transaction?

[Donald Lobo]

the latter is the easiest option.

the former is possible with some custom migration code and assuming paypal allows you to add an IPN for every current recurring contribution. Some steps involve:

1. Set up a recurring contribution and see the records created (contribution_recur and contribution)

2. Find the IPN created for the above recurring contributon and see the pattern

3. for all current recurring paypal contributions, create the needed records in civicrm as #1. Note that the first contribution is a bit different than subsequent ones

4. Add the IPN url to each of those contributions with paypal (first check that u can do this since this is the unknown piece!)

lobo

[mdlueck]

Thank you, Lobo. I think since it is merely for transfer purposes, I will head in the "drop and recreate" direction first.

[jamien-www.compucorp.co.uk]

Hi Mdlueck,

I have a client who has a similar situation with recurring donations in Paypal and would like to migrate them to Civi. Did you have any luck with this? Would Paypal allow you to add an IPN url to existing recurring donations?

Best

Jamie

[mdlueck]

Greetings Jamie,

Did you have any luck with this?

We had avoided a total rebuild of this CiviCRM site. It looked like CiviCRM 4.5.x FINALLY was going to address our long standing issues WITHOUT having to rebuild from scratch. Credit card transactions were finally completing!

Then...

A PayPal transaction came through and has set the site back to nonsense like we had back at CiviCRM 3.2.x or 3.3.x... 

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,32168.msg147499.html#msg147499

And mysteriously form options are changing themselves too, as long long before...

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,34860.msg148110.html#msg148110

Not fun times in CiviAdminVille.

I am thankful,

[mark0514]

I am curious as to whether and progress has been made in this regard, as it seems to be a common need. Also, offline recuriing contributions doesnt appear to be an option in 4.5.5