Why is Authorize.net throwing an error when my rel

Question

I'm not typically a web developer, but I'm a decent enough coder that I felt comfortable accepting a proposal from a friend to develop his brother's small business website. I'm nearly finished and I've been using CodeIgniter, which has been a huge help and was easy to jump into.

They have a handful of products they'd like available for purchase via the site, their preference was Auth.net (which I have no previous experience with), and their host does not support SSL (nearlyfreespeech.net), so I decided that Auth.net's SIM was appropriate. If I test SIM outside of the CI application with a relay response page which simply spits out the available transaction details, everything goes as expected. If I try it with the relay response page set to a CI controller/method which simply echoes a string, Auth.net displays the following 'error':

An error occurred while trying to report this transaction to the merchant. An e-mail has been sent to the merchant informing them of the error. The following is the result of the attempt to charge your credit card.

This transaction has been approved.

It is advisable for you to contact the merchant to verify that you will receive the product or service.

My initial thought was that perhaps the rewrite rule I set up to circumvent having to include the index.php front controller was the issue, so I tried including it in the relay response URL with no change. I should also note that the controller in question implements a _remap() method, but the relay response method shouldn't be affected by it as it doesn't match it's regex.

Any insight(s) would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

This error occurs when your script doesn't respond within a specified amount of time. It also is displayed if anything other then a 200 success message is returned. So basically there is an error in your relay response URL.

You need to test this first by pulling up the page directly to see if it works and returns the proper header response. Then you can test it by sending a simulated POST response to it and see if it also responds properly. If those work make sure the script isn't taking too long to respond. If it is there probably are ways to optimize the slow page to give the response in the appropriate amount.