Subscribing to Platform Notifications

Subscribing to Platform Notifications can be done in several ways, including enabling notifications for existing partners who have not migrated to the latest release.

Your application can subscribe to notifications using SetNotificationPreferences and can check the preferences already set with GetNotificationPreferences. See SetNotificationPreferences and GetNotificationPreferences for more details. Your platform notification usage can be monitored with GetNotificationsUsage. For more information on GetNotificationsUsage and how to use it to troubleshoot notification problems, see GetNotificationsUsage.

Basic Requirements

Your application needs to be able to receive SOAP messages at a notification delivery URL or email address of your choice. XML developers can then parse the SOAP message for the XML content contained within the SOAP envelope.

For more information about SOAP messages, see:

http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/

Notification Delivery URL Requirements

eBay needs to know where to send the notifications. Each notification is delivered by an HTTP post to URLs or by a SMTP message to email addresses that you specify in your notification preferences (see Activating Platform Notifications). A valid notification delivery URL begins with http://or https:// and is well formed. A valid email delivery URL begins with mailto: or mailto:// and is followed by a working email address. For more information about valid URLs, see:

URL Schemas (see httpaddress)

W3C

http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/5_BNF.html

Notification delivery URLs can include query string variables. For example, the following URLs are valid:

http://my_hostname.com/cgi/my_notifications.asp

https://my_hostname.com/cgi/my_notifications.asp?myvar1=45&myvar2=123456789

Note: We recommend that you specify URLs that are currently functional. That is, your application should be ready to receive and respond to SOAP messages that are sent to these URLs. The subscription request will succeed if the delivery URLs are not functional URLs at the time the subscription request is made. However, if eBay begins sending notifications to the URLs and your application does not respond with a standard HTTP status 200 OK, eBay will interpret the lack of response as a notification failure. If a significant number of consecutive notifications fail, eBay may stop sending notifications for events associated with your AppId. If this occurs, please make sure the URLs are functional and then contact Developer Technical Support to reinstate your notification delivery.

Specifying Multiple Notification URLs

You can specify up to 10 notification URLs for an application. You define settings for a notification URL (including the URL name in DeliveryURLName) in an ApplicationDeliveryPreferences.DeliveryURLDetails container in your SetNotificationPreferences request. You associate a user token with a notification URL by using the token in a SetNotificationPreferences request that specifies the URL name in SetNotificationPreferencesRequest.DeliveryURLName. If you associate a single user token to multiple URL names, each URL name overwrites the previous name associated with the token.

Use ApplicationDeliveryPreferences.ApplicationURL to specify a default URL to receive notifications for your application. Notifications will not be sent to any URL(s) if ApplicationDeliveryPreferencesType.ApplicationEnable is set to Disable.

Activating Platform Notifications

To set up the Platform Notifications feature for an application that meets the requirements in Basic Requirements, call SetNotificationPreferences. The request must be sent by the application that subscribes to the Platform Notifications feature. Specify your notification preferences for the application, including the URLs where eBay should send notifications (see Notification Delivery URL Requirements).

To retrieve the preferences currently set for the requesting application, call GetNotificationPreferences. See NotificationEventTypeCodeType for the kinds of events for which an application can subscribe.

User-Contributed Notes