payment intent is null in a subscription checkout session

2
votes

I am integrating stripe using php by following this tutorial: https://phppot.com/php/manage-recurring-payments-using-stripe-billing-in-php/ (my website has some subscription plans and redirects to the stripe checkout form ) . however, for the last step, I decided not to use webhooks, I chose to store the info like in this tutorial https://www.codexworld.com/stripe-checkout-payment-gateway-integration-php/ (I know it is not for subscription but I just use the success.php code from this tutorial to collect the customer info and payment intent details). I tested it, gone throught the stripe checkout form , and on success I printed the checkout session object and noticed that the payment_intent field of that object is empty ! so i cannot load the payment intent object and get its info although the payment is successfully made and it is showing on the dashboard . any idea why ??

EDIT : According to the documenttaion of a checkout session (https://stripe.com/docs/api/checkout/sessions/object), the payment_intent field stores the ID of the PaymentIntent for Checkout Sessions in payment mode. In my case I have a subscription mode not a payment one. however,if I still want to get the $intent->status , can I use the payment_status field of the session object $checkout_session->payment_status? And if subcription payments really don't have paymentintents , then why did the payment appear in the payments section on the dashboard?

1
stripe-payments

1 Answers

3
votes

Based on the mode you passed in, either one of payment_intent, subscription or setup_intent will be populated, the rest will be null.

When a Subscription is made, your user is invoiced so it is considered a payment and will appear in the Payments dashboard. You can retrieve the Subscription and access the latest_invoice field to obtain the Invoice object. The Invoice object contains the `payment_intent field. This is likely what you're looking for.

Using webhook would simplify the process, since you could listen to invoice.payment_suceeded to retrieve the PaymentIntent ID.