Introduction

Foundation

The Swedbank Pay API Platform is built using the REST architectural style and the request and responses come in the JSON format. The API has predictable, resource-oriented URIs and use default HTTP features, like HTTP authentication (using OAuth 2), HTTP methods and headers. These techniques are widely used and understood by most HTTP client libraries.

Connection and Protocol

All requests towards Swedbank Pay API Platform are made with HTTP/1.1 over a secure a TLS 1.2 (or higher) connection. Older HTTP clients running on older operating systems and frameworks might receive connection errors when connecting to Swedbank Pay’s APIs. This is most likely due to the connection being made from the client with TLS 1.0 or even SSL, which are all insecure and deprecated. If such is the case, ensure that you are able to connect over a TLS 1.2 connection by reading information regarding your programming languages and environments (Java, PHP Curl, PHP Zend, Ruby, Python, Node.js Request).

You can inspect Swedbank Pay’s TLS and cipher suite support at SSL Labs. Support for HTTP/2 in our APIs is being investigated.

Postel’s Robustness Principle

We encourage you to keep Postel’s robustness principle in mind. Build your integration in a way that is resilient to change, wherever it may come. Don’t confine yourself to the limits of our current documentation examples. A string looking like a guid must still be handled and stored like a string, not as a guid, as it could be a URI in the future. The day our transactionNumber ticks past 1,000,000, make sure your integration can handle number 1,000,001. If some fields, operations or headers can’t be understood, you must be able to ignore them. We have built our requests in a way which allows the payeeInfo field to be placed before metadata, or vice versa if you want. We don’t expect a specific order of elements, so we ask that you shouldn’t either.

Headers

All requests against the API Platform should have a few common headers:

HTTP request

1
2
3
4
5
6

POST /some/resource HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Accept: application/problem+json; q=1.0, application/json; q=0.9
Authorization: "Bearer 123456781234123412341234567890AB"
Session-Id: 779da454399742248f2942bb064c4707
Forwarded: for=82.115.151.177; host=example.com; proto=https

URI Usage

The base URIs of the API Platform are:

An important part of REST is its use of hypermedia. Instead of having to perform complex state management and hard coding URIs and the availability of different operations in the client, this task is moved to the server. The client simply follows links and performs operations provided by the API, given the current state of the resource. The server controls the state and lets the client know through hypermedia what’s possible in the current state of the resource. To get an introduction to hypermedia, please watch this 20 minute video.

Storing URIs

However, URIs that are used to create new resources can be stored or hard coded. Also, the URI of the generated resource can be stored on your end to GET it at a later point. Note that the URIs should be stored as opaque identifiers and should not be parsed or interpreted in any way.

See the abbreviated example below where psp/creditcard/payments from the POST header is an example of the URI that can be stored, as it is used to create a new resource. Also, the /psp/creditcard/payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1 URI can be stored in order to retrieve the created payment with an HTTP GET request later.

The URIs found within operations such as the href of update-payment-abort, https://api.externalintegration.payex.com/psp/creditcard/payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1 should not be stored.

In order to find which operations you can perform on a resource and the URI of the operation to perform, you need to retrieve the resource with an HTTP GET request first and then find the operation in question within the operations field.

Request

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22

POST /psp/creditcard/payments HTTP/1.1
Authorization: Bearer <AccessToken>
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "payment": {
        "operation": "Purchase",
        "intent": "Authorization",
        "currency": "SEK",
        "prices": [{
                "type": "CreditCard",
                "amount": 1500,
                "vatAmount": 0
            }
        ],
        "description": "Test Purchase",
        "generatePaymentToken": false,
        "generateRecurrenceToken": false,
        "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0...",
        "language": "nb-NO",
     }
 }

Response

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "payment": {
        "id": "/psp/creditcard/payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1",
        "number": 1234567890,
        "instrument": "CreditCard",
        "created": "2016-09-14T13:21:29.3182115Z",
        "updated": "2016-09-14T13:21:57.6627579Z",
        "state": "Ready",
        "operation": "Purchase",
        "intent": "Authorization",
        },
    "operations": [
        {
            "rel": "update-payment-abort",
            "href": "https://api.externalintegration.payex.com/psp/creditcard/payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1",
            "method": "PATCH",
            "contentType": "application/json"
        },
        {
            "rel": "redirect-authorization",
            "href": "https://ecom.externalintegration.payex.com/creditcard/payments/authorize/5a17c24e-d459-4567-bbad-aa0f17a76119",
            "method": "GET",
            "contentType": "text/html"
        },
        {
            "rel": "view-authorization",
            "href": "https://ecom.externalintegration.payex.com/creditcard/core/scripts/client/px.creditcard.client.js?token=5a17c24e-d459-4567-bbad-aa0f17a76119",
            "method": "GET",
            "contentType": "application/javascript"
        }
    ]
}

Uniform Responses

When a POST or PATCH request is performed, the whole target resource representation is returned in the response, as when performing a GET request on the resource URI. This is an economic approach that limits the number of necessary GET requests.

Expansion

The payment resource contain the ID of related sub-resources in its response properties. These sub-resources can be expanded inline by using the request parameter expand. This is an effective way to limit the number of necessary calls to the API, as you return several properties related to a Payment resource in a single request.

Note that the expand parameter is available to all API requests but only applies to the request response. This means that you can use the expand parameter on a POST or PATCHrequest to get a response containing the target resource including expanded properties.

This example below add the urls and authorizations field inlines to the response, enabling you to access information from these sub-resources.

HTTP request with expansion

1
2

GET /psp/creditcard/payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1?$expand=urls,authorizations HTTP/1.1
Host: api.externalintegration.payex.com

To avoid unnecessary overhead, you should only expand the nodes you need info about.

Data Types

Some datatypes, like currency, dates and amounts, are managed in a coherent manner across the entire API Platform.

Currency

All currencies are expressed according to the ISO 4217 standard, e.g SEK, EUR, NOK.

Dates

All dates are expressed according to the ISO 8601 standard that combine dates, time and timezone data into a string, e.g. 2018-09-14T13:21:57.6627579Z.

Locale

When defining locale, we use the combination of language and country codes, e.g. nb-NO, sv-SE, en-US.

Monetary Amounts

All monetary amounts are entered in the lowest momentary units of the selected currency. The amount of SEK and NOK are in ören/ører, and EUR is in cents. Another way to put it is that the code amount is expressed as if the true amount is multiplied by 100.

Operations

When a resource is created and during its lifetime, it will have a set of operations that can be performed on it. Which operations that are available in a given state varies depending on payment instrument used, what the access token is authorized to do, etc. A subset of possible operations are described below. Visit the technical reference page of a payment instrument for instrument specific operations.

JSON with Operations

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26

{
    "payment": {},
    "operations": [
        {
            "href": "http://api.externalintegration.payex.com/psp/creditcard/payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1",
            "rel": "update-payment-abort",
            "method": "PATCH"
        },
        {
            "href": "https://ecom.externalintegration.payex.com/creditcard/payments/authorize/5a17c24e-d459-4567-bbad-aa0f17a76119",
            "rel": "redirect-authorization",
            "method": "GET"
        },
        {
            "href": "https://ecom.externalintegration.payex.com/swish/core/scripts/client/px.swish.client.js?token=5a17c24e-d459-4567-bbad-aa0f17a76119",
            "rel": "view-payment",
            "method": "GET",
            "contentType": "application/javascript"
        },
        {
            "href": "https://api.externalintegration.payex.com/psp/creditcard/payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1/captures",
            "rel": "create-capture",
            "method": "POST"
        }
    ]
}

The operations should be performed as described in each response and not as described here in the documentation. Always use the href and method as specified in the response by finding the appropriate operation based on its rel value.

Payee Reference

The payeeReference given when creating transactions and payments has some specific processing rules depending on specifications in the contract.

• It must be unique for every operation, used to ensure exactly-once delivery of a transactional operation from the merchant system.
• Its length and content validation is dependent on whether the transaction.number or the payeeReference is sent to the acquirer.
  1. If you select Option A in the settlement process (Swedbank Pay will handle the settlement), Swedbank Pay will send the transaction.number to the acquirer and the payeeReference must be in the format of characters A-Za-z0-9 (including -) and string(30).
  2. If you select Option B in the settlement process (you will handle the settlement yourself), Swedbank Pay will send the payeeReference to the acquirer and it will be limited to the format of string(12) and all characters must be digits.

Read more about the settlement process here.

When a change or update from the back-end system are made on a payment or transaction, Swedbank Pay will perform a callback to inform the payee (merchant) about this update.

Providing a callbackUrl in POST requests is mandatory. Below we provide three example scenarios of why this is important:

1. If the payer closes the payment window, the merchant will never know what happened to the payment if callbackUrl is not implemented.
2. If the payer stops up in a payment app such as Vipps or Swish, the payer will never come back to the merchant. This means that the merchant won’t know what happened to the payment unless callbackUrl is implemented.
3. If a payer experiences a network error or something else happens that prevents the payer from being redirected from Swedbank Pay back to the merchant website, the callbackUrl is what ensures that you receive the information about what happened with the payment.

• When a change or update from the back-end system are made on a payment or transaction, Swedbank Pay will perform an asynchronous server-to-server callback to inform the payee (merchant) about this update.
• It is important to know that the callback is asynchronous, and not real-time. As we can’t guarantee when you get the callback, there could be a delay between when the payer is returned back to the merchant and when the callback arrives. If the merchant chooses to wait for the callback, the payer might be left at the merchant’s page until the response comes.
• Swedbank Pay will make an HTTP POST to the callbackUrl that was specified when the payee (merchant) created the payment.
• When the callbackUrl receives such a callback, an HTTP GET request must be made on the payment or on the transaction. The retrieved payment or transaction resource will give you the necessary information about the recent change/update.
• As it isn’t scaled to be a primary source of updates, no given response time can be guaranteed, and a callback might fail. It will be retried if that should happen. Below are the retry timings, in seconds from the initial transaction time:
  • 30 seconds
  • 60 seconds
  • 360 seconds
  • 432 seconds
  • 864 seconds
  • 1265 seconds
• A callback should return a 200 OK response.

The callback is sent from 91.132.170.1 in both the test and production environment.

To understand the nature of the callback, the type of transaction, its status, etc., you need to perform a GET request on the received URI and inspect the response. The transaction type or any other information can not and should not be inferred from the URI. See URI usage for more information.

Payment Instrument Callback

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

{
    "payment": {
        "id": "/psp//payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1",
        "number": 222222222
    },
    "transaction": {
        "id": "/psp//payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1/authorizations/ec2a9b09-601a-42ae-8e33-a5737e1cf177",
        "number": 333333333
    }
}

When performing an HTTP GET request towards the URI found in the transaction.id field of the callback, the response is going to look something like the abbreviated example provided below.

The created authorization resource contains information about the authorization transaction made against a `` payment.

Response

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "payment": "/psp//payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1",
    "authorization": {
        "id": "/psp//payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1/authorizations/ec2a9b09-601a-42ae-8e33-a5737e1cf177",
        "itemDescriptions": {
            "id": "/psp//payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1/transactions/ec2a9b09-601a-42ae-8e33-a5737e1cf177/itemDescriptions"
        },
        "transaction": {
            "id": "/psp//payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1/transactions/ec2a9b09-601a-42ae-8e33-a5737e1cf177",
            "created": "2016-09-14T01:01:01.01Z",
            "updated": "2016-09-14T01:01:01.03Z",
            "type": "Authorization",
            "state": "Completed",
            "number": 1234567890,
            "amount": 1000,
            "vatAmount": 250,
            "description": "Test transaction",
            "payeeReference": "AH123456", 
            "isOperational": false,
            "problem": {
                "type": "https://api.payex.com/psp/errordetail//3DSECUREERROR",
                "title": "Error when complete authorization",
                "status": 400,
                "detail": "Unable to complete 3DSecure verification!",
                "problems": [
                ] 
            "operations": [
                {
                    "href": "/psp//payments/7e6cdfc3-1276-44e9-9992-7cf4419750e1/transactions/ec2a9b09-601a-42ae-8e33-a5737e1cf177",
                    "rel": "edit-authorization",
                    "method": "PATCH"
                }
            ]
        }
    }
}

The sequence diagram below shows the HTTP POST you will receive from Swedbank Pay, and the two GET requests that you make to get the updated status.

sequenceDiagram
    Participant Merchant
    Participant SwedbankPay as Swedbank Pay

    activate SwedbankPay
    SwedbankPay->>+Merchant: POST <callbackUrl>
    deactivate SwedbankPay
    note left of Merchant: Callback by Swedbank Pay
    Merchant-->>+SwedbankPay: HTTP response
    Merchant->>+SwedbankPay: GET  payment
    deactivate Merchant
    note left of Merchant: First API request
    SwedbankPay-->>+Merchant: payment resource
    deactivate SwedbankPay

Problems

When performing operations against a resource in the Swedbank Pay API Platform, it will respond with a problem message that contain details of the error type if the request could not be successfully performed. Regardless of why the error occurred, the problem message will follow the same structure as specified in the Problem Details for HTTP APIs (RFC 7807) specification.

We generally use the problem message type and status code to identify the nature of the problem. The problems array contains objects with name and description that will often help narrow down the specifics of the problem, usually to the field in the request that was missing or contained invalid data.

The structure of a problem message will look like this:

Problem Example

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12

{
    "type": "https://api.payex.com/psp/errordetail/<resource>/inputerror",
    "title": "There was an input error",
    "detail": "Please correct the errors and retry the request",
    "instance": "ec2a9b09-601a-42ae-8e33-a5737e1cf177",
    "status": 400,
    "action": "RetryNewData",
    "problems": [{
        "name": "CreditCardParameters.Issuer",
        "description": "minimum one issuer must be enabled"
    }]
}

Common Problems

All common problem types will have a URI in the format https://api.payex.com/psp/errordetail/<error-type>. The URI is an identifier that you can hard-code and implement logic around. It is currently not not possible to dereference this URI, although that might be possible in the future.

Card Problems

There are a few problems specific to the creditcard resource that you may want to guard against in your integrations. All credit card problem types will have the following URI structure:

https://api.payex.com/psp/errordetail/creditcard/<error-type>

Contractual Problem Types

Acquirer and 3-D Secure Problem Types