I have an array of customers for which I want to bulk charge them in stripe. Sometimes due to network, some charges don't go through while some do therefore making a new request charges all customers again. I read that I could use idempotency but noticed the key regenerates each time I make a request. How do I implement generating the key to identify each user without storing the key in the DB since it is meant to be a temporary key?

 for(customer in customers){
     stripe.charges.create({
        amount: 2000,
        currency: "usd",
        source: token,
        customer: stripe_customerId,
    }, {
       idempotency_key: uuid
    }, function(err, charge) {
        // asynchronously called
    });
}

Any ideas on this, please?

I have an array of customers for which I want to bulk charge them in stripe. Sometimes due to network, some charges don't go through while some do therefore making a new request charges all customers again. I read that I could use idempotency but noticed the key regenerates each time I make a request. How do I implement generating the key to identify each user without storing the key in the DB since it is meant to be a temporary key?

 for(customer in customers){
     stripe.charges.create({
        amount: 2000,
        currency: "usd",
        source: token,
        customer: stripe_customerId,
    }, {
       idempotency_key: uuid
    }, function(err, charge) {
        // asynchronously called
    });
}

Any ideas on this, please?

• javascript
• node.js
• stripe-payments

1 Answer 1

First, you probably don't want to do a for loop for asynchronous code like this; if you have n Customers to charge, you'll make n simultaneous requests, and that could cause a whole range of problems.

Second, you're using Charge code meant to create a one-off Charge from a Stripe Token, not create a Charge from a Customer.

Assuming you actually have saved Customer IDs, you'll probably want to look at using something like async for this.

I would approach it using #queue, and I'd split things up as follows:

1. Iterate over the Customers, and for each, create a 'task' that includes the customer ID, the amount, the currency, a newly-generated idempotency_key, and an attempt_count, and then push that task onto the queue;

2. in the Queue 'processing' function, I would try creating a Charge with that task and its data, and if it fails due to a networking or other retryable error, I would increment attempt_count and push it back onto the queue so it can be retried. I'd probably also have a test to limit the number of retries, and skip/log any that failed, i.e. 5 times.