Paypal Recurring Definitive answer on subscr_eot HELP !

[lobas]

Hello,



Been doing a lot of reading on the when and how the subscr_eot works yet their seems to be many contradictions and if's and but's involved not to mention a lot of the documentation/ discussions seem to range between 2009- 2010.



I am working with the paypal sandbox + IPN. 1 buyer/ 1 seller both created within the last few days. When checking my buyers profile it starts with an I.



The form submits and should be recurring on a daily basis (which shows up correctly when I log into the account and look at the history):



<input type="hidden" name="t3" value="D">
<input type="hidden" name="p3" value="1">



When I create a new recurring payment I get: subscr_payment - GREAT

When I cancel the recurring payment 5 minutes later i get: subscr_cancel - GREAT



This is where I have problems. What I would like is some kind of notification from paypal at the end of the period,which happens to be a day in this example (but will be a year once ive got it all working).



Now from what ive read some people say the feature was removed but then reinstated. Others say you need a profile with a certain ID. If it begins with 'I' then if the user cancels you will never get EOT. If its S and someone cancels you will still get it at the end of the time period (the latter sounds like what I need).



Others then also said to check against the recurring_payment_expired as well as the subscr_eot so I have the following php snippet:



elseif($txn_type == 'subscr_eot' || $txn_type == "recurring_payment_expired"){

//do something

}



The above code does NOT return anything after the user cancels.



Now my first question is: With the current system in place for both live and sandbox with a new paypal account that creates profiles that start with an 'I' can i recieve any kind of notification which could then be used to check and reset a users account if they had set up a recurring payment but then cancelled before the end of the time period?



The second question is, if the above is not possible is it possible to change sandbox and live accounts so they use the S profile so that I can make use of the actual EOT when a user cancels? This is of course assuming that the logic behind 'I' and 'S' still exists or has this now changed?



If the above cannot be done is their anything that paypal sends or does that can help tackle the problem. Ideally I would like to refrain from capturing the recurring payment start date and then run soemthing like a cron job which has to regularly compare dates and act accordingly. Id like to contain the system as much as possible not to mention checking a very large number of records which will be continually growing on a daily basis seems very wasteful.



Finally if their is no way whatsoever for me to do this via the IPN and I have to resport to doing it on my server please can you share why this feature was removed/ modified etc? Also is their any chance it will be enabled again and when?





Would be great to have some upto date information on the actual process as well.



Thanks for reading, apologies for the essay. Just want to get some upto date information which im sure will help a lot of peoople including myself.