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Currently I have a script which processes orders after someone is directed to a payment processor.

The payment processor will occasionally send two (or more) responses to my site (usually within a minute of the first response).
I have contacted the payment processor about the issue; they don't see this as an issue with their system and say my script should take into account any extra responses and only listen to the last one sent.

On multiple response orders, the first response is successful, and so the order is processed when this response comes in.
If a 2nd response comes, its usually about 30 seconds later with an error response and I cancel the order.
The problem is that I have already sent out a "thank you for your order" email to the customer from the first response, which obviously isn't ideal.

Is there a way to trigger a separate script to run a few minutes after the order is processed? i.e to check if the order is still valid a couple of minutes after the original order and send the email out

I was thinking a cron job which runs every minute, but surely this would be overkill since the script only needs to run if an order has been placed?

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3 Answers 3

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You can start background job using shell_exec("/usr/bin/php /path/to/test.php ".($orderId)." &"); with 3 minute delay at the start (sleep(180)); and then execute code to check status of the order. $argv[2] should contain your orderId number.

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2 Comments

Would doing a delay using sleep not eat into memory if the site had quite a lot of orders/traffic?
Probably, but if there are a lot of orders then cron every five minutes should be fine. (It would be checking only orders older than five minutes and not checked yet).
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Heres what you can do

after the first response is recieved, make your script wait for some time, say 1 minute using the sleep() function

http://php.net/manual/en/function.sleep.php

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I wouldn't recommend doing this. The web server will kill the PHP process after a certain point. It will also delay the request. Much better to spawn a background process with shell_exec.
The difference is the initial process is PHP-fastcgi or mod_php. With shell_exec you're spawning PHP-CLI in the background, which isn't managed by the web server.
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Why can't you change you message and notify a person with an email after second request came from your payment processor?

As I understand - your processor is already calling some URL on your site while sending second response. So that is a trigger you need. If they have no such callback functionality - you may just install some cron to which will go through not completely processed orders and check payment statuses for such orders and notify customer with another email.

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The point is that I don't want the first success email going out if an error response then comes from the processor.
@Nick You can't keep user waiting for few minutes while second response will came. And I'm not saying to send "success" email immediatelly. My point is that if processor already trigger your script - you should better wait for it and send success/error email after that. Even with delay you will have similar behavior - some message to user about payment is in proggress and than - message about success/failure. But if you must do a request to get an info (processor will not call your url) - cron should be the thing you need.
I'm not keeping the user waiting at all. This all happens on a callback script, the interface is elsewhere.

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