Stripe API: Unable to get price/plan from some PaymentIntent objects

Question

I'm currently using the Stripe API to get a list of PaymentIntents. The intents are created from a mix of subscriptions and one-off payments from a Stripe Link.

The API call using the typescript client looks like:

      paymentsPage = await stripeClient.paymentIntents.list({
        starting_after,
        expand: [
          "data.invoice",
          "data.invoice.subscription",
          "data.latest_charge",
          "data.line_items",
          "data.payment_page",
          "data.transfer_data",
          // Doesn't work, but seems to be what the Stripe web-app uses
          // "data.line_item_group",
        ],
      });

I'm having trouble getting a price_ or plan_ ID for the PaymentIntents created from the Stripe Link.

• Invoice is null
• I can't seem to get line_items anywhere
• The web-app (as seen from network requests) relies on a line_item_group field, but I can't seem to get that.

Any thoughts on where I can get that information?

Answer 1

A couple of things to note here.

Firstly, there aren't any attributes on the Payment Intent object that correspond with line_items, line_item_group, or payment_page, so you need to remove those from the expand parameter in your request.

Secondly, Stripe only generates an Invoice for a payment if the payment is either:

1. part of a Subscription, or
2. part of an one-off Invoice that you already created

It sounds like you're using Payment Links, which are not part of an Invoice workflow, so it is expected that the invoice attribute on your Payment Intent object is null in some cases.

Lastly, line_item_group is not used in any material way by Stripe users. That seems to be internal data that only Stripe uses, so I'm not sure how your web app could rely on it.

Answer 2

Is there no way to go from the PaymentIntent created via a payment link back to a payment link or a product to therefor determine what was purchased?

Late reply here, hopefully useful.

You can't get the Checkout Session starting from the Payment Intent, but there is a way around this. This is the flow : Payment Link creates Checkout Session > Checkout Session creates Payment Intent

You can list Checkout Sessions by Payment Intent (with your pi_id) [0], which will return the right Session object, which would not only have the Payment Link ID, it would also have the line_items (though you need to expand them) [1].

[0] https://stripe.com/docs/api/checkout/sessions/list#list_checkout_sessions-payment_intent
[1] https://stripe.com/docs/api/expanding_objects

Obviously, if you want to do this for many payments, it's not ideal. Creating Checkout Sessions yourself would offer more options, but Payment Links are limited...