django-paypal IPN signals not being received

Question

At the bottom of models.py I have:

from paypal.standard.ipn.signals import payment_was_successful, payment_was_flagged
import pay

payment_was_successful.connect(pay.paypal_success)
payment_was_flagged.connect(pay.paypal_flagged)

I'm using the Paypal Developer IPN simulator and it returns "IPN sent successfully", but the code in pay.paypal_success and pay.paypal_flagged isn't being executed.

The paypal_ipn table is being populated, however I noticed under flag_info every row has:

Invalid form. (<ul class="errorlist"><li>payment_date<ul class="errorlist">
<li>Enter a valid date/time.</li></ul></li></ul>)

I don't know if this has anything to do with the signals not working.

Answer 1

I've had the same problem.

Apparently the date format the IPN simulator sends is different from the one the django-paypal package accepts.

Head over to paypal.standard.forms.py and add the 'new format date' PayPal sends.

PAYPAL_DATE_FORMAT = ("%H:%M:%S %b. %d, %Y PST",
                      "%H:%M:%S %b. %d, %Y PDT",
                      "%H:%M:%S %d %b %Y PST",    # note this
                      "%H:%M:%S %d %b %Y PDT",    # and that
                      "%H:%M:%S %b %d, %Y PST",
                      "%H:%M:%S %b %d, %Y PDT",)

I don't like this solution, because what if PayPal changes the date string format in the future?

This is actually a caveat of Python's datetime object that does not know how to easily convert strings to actual time objects easily.

But that works for now.