[New to the payments space, Devang decides to check out Visa Developer APIs to see whether the portal will be a good fit for his application idea. Below, he documents his experience.]
“I’ve always wanted to create a payment app. My idea was to build an app that sends and receives money. I started by searching for “send money” in the Visa Developer Center search box. The suggestion I received, was to refer to: Visa Direct.”
API Documentation Research
After reading through Visa Direct’s product documentation, I figured out that the push and pull funds APIs seemed to meet my needs. I played around with the API explorer a bit, tinkered with the values here and there and saw how those changes affected the response. What’s great about this utility is that it lets you play with JSON and XML payloads. It’s useful for developers who may want to integrate these kinds of APIs into their legacy systems.
After spending some time going through the Visa Direct API documentation, I decided to get started building my application.
Creating a Project
Creating a Visa Direct project was simple. I selected Visa Direct in the ‘Create app’ section, downloaded my private key and was directed to the app dashboard.
Here, I found links to test the application data (these will come in handy later when I decide to test my project with sample data), obtain project credentials and download other project samples.
The project credentials provided are the sandbox credentials. According to Visa Developer Center, the sandbox APIs are perfect for testing and bootstrapping applications. This is really helpful when all you want to do is sample and test APIs to see if they might meet your needs and requirements.
Building my Project Using Sample Code
To get started quickly, I decided to create a node project and to call the PUSH Funds API. Fortunately, there was sample code available that used Node. After downloading the project, I was surprised to find that the code compiled in seconds.
Initially, I got frustrated because I realized that the sample code is just a test case based application. It works fine if you want to see if your credentials work well, but it’s difficult integrating this code into your own project. That’s when I had an epiphany and decided to use Visa Developer’s “help” methods by bootstrapping my own project. (Midway through, I realized that this was their intention.)
Low and behold, I plugged in my credentials, my certificates and voila—I got a neat little 200 HTTP response back!
With all of this new traction gained, I then felt motivated to be pro-active and start writing test cases for various scenarios that I could add to this call. The test data section in the project dashboard really helped me out. Once again, I was able to include cases which I normally would have missed.
Currently, I’m taking more time to play with my application and test out some more use cases in the hope of making it more performant.
Requesting Access to Showcase My Project
Once I’m ready, I’ll request to obtain production credentials to showcase my app in Production, by submitting a form available under the ‘Project Promotion’ tab on the “Project Dashboard” page. In that section, I learned that I can either ask Visa to help me find a sponsor or directly connect to a sponsor myself. So far, this has been a fun and empowering journey. Next step: I hope I’ll get to showcase my app in production.
More information on how to get started with Visa Developer, including videos and links can be found here: http://vi.sa/2hGcKNw
