Has anyone else experienced the frustration of calling the help center and receiving absolutely no help at all? I called and said, "I'm having difficulties implementing the SOAP ARB interface." The customer service representative asked, "What is SOAP?" Hmm-m-m, not a good sign, so I asked to speak with someone in the technical help department. I was told that there was no technical support available. She also said that they don't help with anything outside of Authorize.Net. I tried to explain that the SOAP service was not outside of Authorize.net, it was on their website, provided by them. This time they denied having any kind of SOAP service. And they used the line about not helping with "scripting". I asked to speak to this person's manager and received all of the same lines, although at least this person did not deny that Authorize.net has a SOAP service.
I wanted to report some errors in their service. When you instantiate a response type, such as ARBCreateSubscriptionResponseType, it defaults the resultCode to OK. If some goes wrong along the way to assigning a value to the response type, you wouldn't know because the resultCode is OK. It should default to something more appropriate like "Initialized" and save the "Ok" and "Error" for after something has taken place. The ARB_SOAP_guide.pdf is so inadequate, it should be considered wrong. It states that startDate is required. However, filling in startDate is not enough. You must also set startDateSpecified = true, otherwise it won't read it. The same thing with totalOccurrences. The document says it is required, true enough, but you also have to set totalOccurrencesSpecified = true so it will read the totalOccurrences field. The documentation makes no mention of having to fill in these other fields so that the required fields will be read. On the optional fields, such as trialOccurrences and trialAmount, if you are not going to fill in values, then you have to set trialOccurrencesSpecified and trialAmountSpecified = false. What kind of thinking led to fields like this?!? If a field is required, you shouldn't have to have a second field saying that you filled in the first field. And if a field is optional, you shouldn't have to have a second field saying that you didn't fill in the first field.
I eventually got it working, but it was in spite of the "help" Authorize.net provides, not because of it.
