Determine if Merchant has changed Transaction Key

[cmgsupport]

I have a payment form that uses the AIM method to post to Auth.net via PHP.  It works great until our customer resets their Transaction Key.  I need to know if there is a way to determine (via PHP) if a merchant has reset their Transaction Key.  Any suggestions? Sample code?

Thanks in advance,

[stymiee]

There is no way to determine this programmatically except to see an authentication error. It should be error code 13 - The merchant login ID or password is invalid or the account is inactive.

[cmgsupport]

Is there a way to validate authentication without a transaction? In other words, could I take the API Login ID and the Transaction key and make a call to Auth.net to generate the error code 13 without doing a financial transaction? Ultimately I'm looking for a way to be proactive...so I could easily setup a cron that checks every day to see if the transaction key has changed and notify the client if it is no longer valid.

Thanks in advance.

[stymiee · Accepted solution]

Make a call to the Transaction Detail API which doesn't require a transaction being processed but will require authentication. That should do exactly what you need with no cost to the merchant.

[cmgsupport]

Beautiful!  You are amazing!!!  Can you point me to any PHP sample code?

Again, thanks in advance!

[stymiee]

I just created some code for working with all of the XML APIs including the Transaction Detail API. It includes sample code. You can find it at the AuthnetXML Github Repository. You should see a link to download the zipfile with all of the code. Hopefully you find it useful.