I'm writing an application that integrates with square and requires that I download and store the entire history of a merchant's payments at sign-up. What is the best way to download the entire history of payments?
In this PHP example, the author repeatedly requests the v1/<location>/payments endpoint until all payments have been pulled. Is repeatedly hitting that endpoint the best/only way to download all payments? If so, considering the rate limit for the connect API and the potential for many users to be signing up and triggering full history downloads at the same time, how can I prevent my requests from getting blocked?
The above issue is mainly about a one-time sync of payments from square to my application. Is there a preferred way to keep my application's set of payments for a merchant in sync with square's set of payments for a merchant into the future? i.e. a way to 1) download all payments on sign-up and 2) download any future payments as they become available.
You should use the v2/transactions endpoints, as they are more performant. You are correct in your approach, I would be sure to implement a robust back off strategy if you do end up hitting the rate limit. Depending on the merchant size, downloading the full transaction history likely won't take more than a minute or so.
To keep the transactions up to date, you can regularly pull new transactions and do diffs, or utilize webhooks