Showing User Friendly Gateway Errors with braintree_php? - braintree

Question

I've been using Braintree for about a year in an e-commerce website and I regularly hear from customers that they can't figure out why their payments are rejected. When a transaction is rejected, I display the error messages returned by Braintree (via braintree_php 5.x), which frequently looks like "Gateway Rejected: avs" (my customers do not know what any of those words mean).
Vexingly, these errors don't seem to be accompanied by an error code. Here is the (abbreviated) response object:
object(Braintree\Result\Error) {
success => false
[protected] _attributes => [
'errors' => object(Braintree\Error\ErrorCollection) {
[private] _errors => object(Braintree\Error\ValidationErrorCollection) {
[protected] _collection => []
[private] _errors => []
[private] _nested => []
}
},
[...]
'message' => 'Gateway Rejected: avs',
[...]
'creditCardVerification' => null,
'subscription' => null,
'merchantAccount' => null,
'verification' => null
]
}
So, in order to catch these gateway errors and communicate them intelligibly to my customers, I've had to rely on the inspection of $result->message. My code looks something like this:
$result = $this->gateway->transaction()->sale([...]);
if (!$result->success) {
switch ($result->message) {
case 'Gateway Rejected: avs':
$error = 'The billing postal code you provided failed validation. Please try again.';
break;
case 'Gateway Rejected: avs_and_cvv':
$error = 'The postal code and/or CVV you provided failed validation. Please try again.';
break;
case 'Gateway Rejected: cvv':
$error = 'The CVV you provided failed validation. Please try again.';
break;
case 'Gateway Rejected: duplicate':
$error = 'Payment rejected as duplicate. If you feel this is in error, please contact us.';
break;
case 'Gateway Rejected: fraud':
$error = 'Payment rejected. Please try another payment method.';
break;
case 'Gateway Rejected: risk_threshold':
$error = 'Payment rejected. Please try another payment method.';
break;
default:
$error = $result->message ?? 'Payment failed. Please check your payment information and try again.';
break;
}
}
This is working, but it feels like the wrong approach. For instance, what if Braintree modifies the $result->message text? And why am I not being given an error code? I would assume that this is a problem almost everyone who uses braintree_php would encounter, but I haven't been able to find any mention of it or any code demonstrating an alternative method to handle errors.
I'd greatly appreciate any feedback on my work around and alternatives to it! (And on the chance that this is actually the best way to handle these errors, I'm documenting my approach here for others.)

Answer 1

You should be getting an error code back. Trying to catch messages like you point out is a bad idea for the reason you(and they) mention about them changing the text.
The error codes are here - https://developer.paypal.com/braintree/docs/reference/general/validation-errors/all/php#transaction
This is what I am doing to catch the codes and display the message. I am returning an array of errors, but you can do whatever works for you.
$error_array = [];
if ($result->success) {
//Process Transaction
} elseif (!is_null($result->transaction)){
$error_array[] = "Transaction status - " . $result->transaction->status;
} else {
foreach($result->errors->deepAll() as $error) {
switch($error->code){
case 91569:
case 81725:
$error_array[] = 'Payment method is not valid';
break;
default:
$error_array[] = $error->message;
}
}
}
Some of their message text is not user friendly, so you will want use the switch statement to catch the code and give a clearer message.