Perhaps my original post did not illustrate the issue clearly. I see that the PPID can be obtained using the CPID but that is not the entire picture...
We have been using AIM for over 10 years but have hit a brick wall with Authorize.net for a lack of a way to offload the entering of the CC number and CC expiration fields off of our servers. I have spent a week researching this and despite what developer@authorize.net and community.developer.authorize.net have told me, it is apparently not possible to convert our AIM process to use DPM or the CIM hosted form because Authorize.net does not provide a way for our server to pass a Customer Profile ID CPID to the DPM form or the CIM hosted form to create a Payment Profile ID PPID nor does Authorize.net provide a way for our server to immediately get the newly created PPID so that a financial transaction can be submitted; all from the same single click from the customer's browser. The hosted form will not work for us.
It sounds like PayPal’s PayFlowPro system will do what we need but if we have to switch to using them, we will have to manually contact all of our credit card customers and manually enter their payment information into the PayFlowPro system since all of our current customers’s card data has been tokenized with Authorize.net. That will be an expensive and time consuming process. It will however, be more cost effective in the long run than having to spend a huge amount of money to get our current AIM processing system PCI compliant.
Our company sells health insurance memberships which begin with the processing of the membership’s first month’s dues at the time of enrollment. Using AIM, our system submits the data to create the CPID and PPID which is then used to submit one payment transaction for each membership the customer is enrolling in; up to three separate transactions using the same PPID for each membership in our website’s ‘shopping cart’ are submitted within seconds of each other. Due to insurance regulations, each membership (dental, vision, etc.) must be processed separately. Our system relies on the CPIDs and PPIDs of our members for monthly recurring billing. Authorize.net’s recurring billing service is not compatible with our recurring billing system for our members.
All of our customer’s information must be collected at the beginning of the membership enrollment process because the memberships are limited by state availability and age. Because we must collect the customer’s data first, it is not feasible to display the CIM hosted form where address fields appear which will confuse our customers because they already entered their address earlier in the enrollment process.
The closest method that Authorize.net has to offer is DPM but it does not provide a field for a CPID and even if it did, I have found no information about what is in or what the format is of the resulting relay url post; ideally it would have the PPID but if it includes something to identify customer from the DPM post, then we could use getCustomerProfile to get the PPID so that the first month’s dues payment can be submitted.
The getHostedProfilePageRequest has an input element for the CPID; why not provide that with DPM?
If there is a way to include the CPID in the DPM form to create the PPID and the resulting relay url post to our server has data that can be used to associate that relay post with a specific DPM post (we will need documentation regarding the relay post data and format), then we can work with that.
Otherwise, we will be looking into more modern payment gateway options.
