--- title: Making requests with stripe-java slug: making-requests-with-stripe-java published_at: 2020-12-30 19:00:05 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:54:00 +0000 summary: description: Learn how to make requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-java client library. You'll see how to format parameters and pass request body, query string params, and request headers. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official client library: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-java Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/java/DemoRequest.java ### Table of contents 00:00 Overview 01:16 API reference 04:10 Create an object passing no params 05:45 Retrieve single object 06:36 Create an object with scalar values 08:40 Create an object with enum values 11:03 Create an object with nested object 13:41 Create an object with a list of strings 15:00 Update an object with scalar values 17:57 Update an object with a list of nested objects 21:55 Retrieve a list of objects 23:30 Retrieve a list filtered by scalar 25:28 Delete an object 26:30 Custom methods overview 27:28 Custom method demo 31:46 Nested service method overview 32:16 Nested service method demo 35:38 Request headers overview 36:43 Request headers demo 39:30 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments tags: [stripe, payments, stripe-java, API, client library, sdk, java, @cjav_dev] views: 3287 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/making-requests-with-stripe-java youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg6xosdd2GM youtube_id: cg6xosdd2GM embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/cg6xosdd2GM thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cg6xosdd2GM/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Making requests with stripe-java *Published: December 30, 2020* *Views: 3287* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg6xosdd2GM) [![Making requests with stripe-java](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cg6xosdd2GM/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg6xosdd2GM) ## Description Learn how to make requests to the Stripe API using the stripe-java client library. You'll see how to format parameters and pass request body, query string params, and request headers. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Resources Official client library: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-java Code: https://github.com/stripe-samples/developer-office-hours/blob/master/2020-10-30-client-libraries/java/DemoRequest.java ### Table of contents 00:00 Overview 01:16 API reference 04:10 Create an object passing no params 05:45 Retrieve single object 06:36 Create an object with scalar values 08:40 Create an object with enum values 11:03 Create an object with nested object 13:41 Create an object with a list of strings 15:00 Update an object with scalar values 17:57 Update an object with a list of nested objects 21:55 Retrieve a list of objects 23:30 Retrieve a list filtered by scalar 25:28 Delete an object 26:30 Custom methods overview 27:28 Custom method demo 31:46 Nested service method overview 32:16 Nested service method demo 35:38 Request headers overview 36:43 Request headers demo 39:30 Conclusion ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments ## Transcript the stripe api is organized around standard restful conventions it uses those standard http requests and responses with predictable resource oriented urls request bodies are form encoded and responses are json encoded http requests you make can send data to stripe servers in one of three parts of the request in the request body this is where you pass parameters to create update and take specific actions on objects so for instance if you're creating a customer the customer's email address might be something that you pass in the body of a post request http headers which is where the configuration like api key and api version are sent you know in our docs will often refer to the arguments as request params there's also query string params most often used for filtering lists with get requests in this video you'll learn how to format request parameters so that you can effectively work from the api reference to make most requests and build almost any supported stripe integration the api reference is the detailed documentation about each resource cataloging the supported parameters some sample requests and responses generally when building an integration you'll follow an official guide but may need some specialized params to solve for your specific use case on the left you'll find a list of resources expanding customers shows which api endpoints are available for working with customers under the customer resource we see the customer object and methods for creating retrieving updating deleting and listing customers the customer object describes the shape and attributes of an instance of a customer that's returned in the responses from the stripe api you'll notice that some attributes are marked with the expand label we'll cover the expand feature of the api and how to work with it from client libraries in more detail in another episode however i just want to show that this is how from the api reference you can tell which attributes are expandable the create a customer api endpoint describes the parameters sent to the stripe api when creating a customer on the far right side we see a code snippet example with some basic params note that you can switch from curl to the stripe cli or any of our officially supported client libraries to see a basic code snippet in the programming language you're most familiar with in the next section of the api reference we'll see details about making a request to create a customer these are the parameters that can be sent in the post body to the stripe api to create customer objects the most common parameters are listed at the top and then additional or more advanced parameters are included below under the more parameters subheading if your account's default api version is older than the latest version then you might also see a panel with information about breaking changes released in a newer api version note that all parameters for creating a customer here are optional if we look at the create a payment intent reference you'll see a label showing that the amount and currency parameters are required in some cases parameters might be conditionally required as is true for off session the values for these parameters or the arguments can be scalar values objects arrays of objects or arrays of strings sub-objects or child parameters can also be deeply nested as is the case with shipping address some params might be enum values like tax exempt which accepts none exempt or reverse in this episode we'll cover how to construct the arguments passed to the client library so that you can be confident in passing scalar values or more complex parameters like lists of nested objects alright so i have created a file called demorequest.java with stripe java imported and my api key already set i've also got a build java with some dot sh with some shell scripts to compile and run our demo so let's start with a very simple request to create a customer uh with no params so i'm just going to say let's see create a customer with no params and it looks just like this we're going to say customer create params that's the type is equal to customer create params.builder so this is with types in java using the builder pattern the builder pattern now our api call it potentially might raise an error so we have to handle that with a try catch block here so i'm going to say try to create a customer customer.create params and then we'll just uh print those out we'll just print the entire customer out if this works okay otherwise we'll just print out the error all right so let's run our command to build and run this java demo and we can see now that we have some output so in the terminal output you'll see the customer object that was returned in the attributes that are populated for you by default if we wanted to we could fetch a single customer later on and we could do so by making a get request to retrieve the customer with their id so this cus underscore is the id of the customer that we just created so let's update our our demo code here to now retrieve this customer comment that out and then i'm going to say this is a fetch a customer and we're going to say customer is we don't need to pass in any params this time and instead of create we're going to call retrieve retrieve is just going to take one argument and that is going to be the id of the customer okay so this should retrieve and print out the customer again the the json that's returned is going to be the same because these customer objects are the same so we first created it and now we are retrieving it so that's how we can fetch a customer okay so let's keep going here so we're gonna spice things up a bit and create another customer this time with a name and an email address so we're this this will be uh create a customer with scalar values so we can create another instance of params so create customer params is equal to customercreateparams.builder.build okay and this time rather than having just empty params we can set some values here so using the setters from the java types we can say dot set email and pass in the string value for the email address so we'll pass in jenny rosen we can also set the name and we can say jenny rosen here like so so this will create a customer object with those params so this will send a post request with that request body and if we run this again our demo we'll see the name returned is set to jenny rosen and the email address is set to jenny.rosen at example.com again the stripe api expects parameters to be passed as form encoded strings so in the post body not as json the response is json but the request is form encoded a form encoded string so the above this this request would actually look like in the post body it's going to look something like this it'll have email is equal to jenny rosen at example.com ampersand name equals jenny and then like percent 20 for the space rows in so this is what the actual post body will look like and so stripe java the stripe java client library is abstracting this away so that you don't have to think about it but it's something to keep in mind if you're attempting to make requests outside of the context of stripe java so if you're just kind of like making your own requests keep in mind that the request body needs to be this form encoded let's talk about some enum values so some of the scalars accept specific enum values so let's say create a customer with enum so the tax exempt parameter on the customer object accepts one of none exempt or reverse so let's build out the params for creating a customer with the tax exempt parameter so we can say customer create params params is equal to customer create params dot builder dot build and then we want to jump up here and say set tax exempt to customer create params.tax exempt dot none so that's kind of what the this is sort of the pattern that we follow for naming our enum values in stripe java okay and then again we can say try customer customer equals customer.create params print out the customer object otherwise print out the error message we get back and okay so let's run this and see what we get so the tax exempt remember that we're setting the tax exempt in this case to none but we could change this also to like reverse so if we run this now we're creating another customer but it's tax exempt is set to reverse now if if we wanted to we could pass in a string value here that is invalid and if we attempt to run this we'll see that the string invalid not only is it not a valid value for possible enums but it's also not an instance of this like tax exempt thing so it's keeping track for you stripe java will let you know if you've used an invalid value for the enum so that's just kind of how you access those those enum values it's through there is an inner class on the customer create params class and that inner class will have those static properties for the enum values so that is how we can create a customer with enum values or how you pass enum values with stripe java all right so let's up the stakes yet again and send some data that's nested inside of a child parameter so here again we're going to like create a customer with a nested object and we're going to create our params again and this time we want to say dot set payment method this is going to be another scalar like before and then in addition to this top level payment method setting we can set invoice settings so invoice settings is like a nested hash or a nested object and when we make the request to the to the stripe api invoice settings will be a set of parameters that are nested under the top level invoice settings param in the case of passing some nested object what we want to do is actually create we're going to use the builder pattern yet again to create the params for this inner object so we can say customer create params.invoicesettings.builder dot build so that'll create an instance of those params and build those and on the invoice settings param like on this this nested object that we're creating we want to also set uh the default set default payment method 2 pm card visa and we'll talk about pm card visa in just a minute so we have a try catch block where we're going to create a customer with these params and then we're going to print those out and if there's an error we'll print the error out okay so if we run this we see the invoice settings now include a default payment method that has an id pm card visa is one of the test payment method ids if we pass that at the top level payment method and inside of the invoice settings default payment method then our resulting test customer can successfully make recurring payments in test mode for a billing subscription and other invoices all right so that's how we can sort of create and build up these nested objects sometimes i i do look into the github source for all the names for these inner classes and the all of the builder methods that are available but in practice most of the time you can sort of guess what they are and they should be predictable based on the names of the fields inside of the api reference okay so this is how you create a customer with uh with yeah the nested object so some parameters except lists of strings so when you're creating a customer one of the things you can specify is a list of preferred locales like so so we're going to say create a customer with a list of strings and let's see okay so again we're gonna do customer create params we're gonna call instead of calling set we're gonna call add or we're gonna use the add one of the um the add method so add preferred locale and we can pass in en and we can say add preferred locale yes and these this will add these strings to a list of strings that are built up and ultimately used to send the request to create the customer okay so this is how we can create a customer with a list of strings and if we look at the preferred locales on the customer that's returned we see that it has both english and spanish returned for us so this is how we can pass again a list of strings with um the the strung types in stripe java so now that we've created several customers let's see how we can update an existing customer so the concepts from earlier around building up the params object are going to be very similar however we're also going to need to pass the id of the object we want to update so all objects in the stripe api have these string ids like we talked about customer ids start with the cus underscore and then what we're going to do is while updating the customer we'll pass that as the first argument the update method and then the second argument will be one of these instances of an update params object so let's update the email address for a customer so we're going to say update and the email address for a customer okay so again we need to say customer update params params and the builder works very similar customer update params dot builder dot build and we're gonna say set email and this is going to be the new email jr at example.com and then we'll say try so first we need to retrieve the customer so we're going to say customer is customer.retrieve and pass in that string id and then next we're going to say customerupdatedcustomer is equal to customer.update for params and then we can print out customer.email and we can print out the updated customer.email or we can print the error so let's run this i spelt updated customer wrong okay so the very first customer that we retrieved had no email and then the second one had jr at example.com so let's change the email address from jr to jr2 and then we'll rerun this just so that we can confirm that the email address is actually changing so yeah so the customer this is the original customer has jr example.com and customer two has the updated email address so this is how we make an update request we construct some update params retrieve the instance of the object call update on the object passing those params in and that should make the post request to update the object in the strive api okay so we can also follow this same pattern for updating nested objects and other patterns of params that we've seen already so let's update a customer with nested params so here we have our update params before we were setting the email let's update that to set invoice settings and i know that we've looked at this already and the last time that we used invoice settings we were setting the default payment method so again we say customerupdateparams.invoicesettings dot builder dot build and then i'm just gonna break this up onto some lines so we can keep track of what's going on here and then within the invoice settings we can um so invoice settings takes a default payment method but it also takes custom fields custom fields support passing a list of objects that are nested remember or recall that when we passed a list of strings and we added those preferred locales that we used the add helper and so we said add preferred locale and passed in the string value for the locale in this case we're passing a list of nested objects so we're going to use an add helper but this time the ad is going to be add custom field and rather than passing just a scalar value for the custom field in this case we're going to pass in sort of like another nested object so here we want to pass a custom field object so i'm going to say customer update params dot invoice settings dot custom field dot builder and then dot build right and then we're gonna we're we'll specify all of our setters for building up this instance of a custom field so here we want to say like dot set uh set name and we'll pass that and then dot set value so this is going to be abc123 a common use case for a custom field in invoice settings is for passing the tax id for the account in this case we are just going to pass in vat and abc123 it turns out that we've recently released a feature of the api where you can set your tax ids in the stripe dashboard and those will flow through to your invoices so you don't need this workaround anymore this was a common ask for folks in europe especially where there are regulations around having tax ids on invoices but i want to show just how you can pass a list so this is this is one item we're adding one item to a list of custom fields technically you could you know call this again um so we can have like two two calls to add custom field and maybe this one is um maybe the second one is like that too and then you know xyz 987 or something right so this would add two custom fields so we are creating these customer update params um and setting a bunch of invoice settings for the customer update params we're going to retrieve our customer our existing customer and then we're going to update that customer and we're going to print out the let's say get invoice settings and let's see what that looks like we need to print out the updated customer invoice settings and okay so this is this is the the object that was returned we're looking at just the invoice settings and we can see that there are two custom fields this is a list or an array of objects and these objects there are two we added one that is a custom field with the name for that and the value for abc123 name vat2 value 9 so this is how you can pass sort of a list of nested objects with stripe java all right so we can make a get request to fetch a page from the list of customers with the list method so here we're just going to like fetch a list of customers customer list params params is equal to customer listparams.builder um.maybe.set limit as three dot build so this will create the params that we need for fetching our list we need to try catch again and here we'll say customer collection customers is equal to customer.list and then we need to pass in params and we can print out customers we can also say like for customer in customers.getdata and print out the customer get id this might be more useful okay so this is how we fetch a list of customers let's take a look so we'll see that there were three customers returned that's because we set the limit to three and we see their ids printed out so this is this is how we fetch a list of or a page from the list of customers it turns out that stripe java supports auto pagination which is a super handy tool for working with lists we actually have an episode all about pagination it talks about list endpoints and how to work with the limit ending before and starting after parameters all of these options are covered in that pagination episode so highly recommend checking that out one other thing that you can do with the customer list endpoint is filter the list by customer's email so let's fetch a list of customers filtered by email we can say set email and we'll say jenny.rosen at example.com it's a really common email address i use for for demo purposes and as we're printing out the customers let's also print out their id and their email address so now we can we can rerun this the output will see the customer id and then the email address of the customer you'll notice that the customer ids are unique and an id for an object in stripe uniquely identifies that object for your account however the email address is not a unique identifier for customers in the stripe api so you'll notice that we have several different customers on our account all have the same email address jenny rosen at example.com and the customer list endpoint allows you to filter by the email address of the customer it turns out you can also filter by um you know based on the date the customer was created um and so this this this might be helpful but it's useful to know that customers are not uniquely identifiable by their email address in stripe another thing worth pointing out here is that this email is passed in the query string parameter so you can imagine like the api endpoint is v1 customers and then there's a query string param that says email equal to jenny.rosen example.com so that's kind of what that looks like occasionally you may want to delete an object all right so we're going to delete a customer here delete expects the id of the object that you are going to delete the way that this works is we first retrieve an instance of the customer and then we call delete on that instance so we have an id for a customer already i'm just going to say maybe we say customer customer is equal to customer.retrieve cus and the id of the customer and then we can call customer deleted customer it's equal to customer.delete this is going to make this is a you know like fetch api call and this is a delete api call and we can print out the deleted customer here and we'll print out the exception so this is how you delete an object in the api and you'll notice that here we see deleted is true if we pull up the documentation for the payment intent resource you'll see that there are some additional api methods on the left in addition to the standard crud operations some resources support additional actions also known as custom methods in the case of a payment intent you'll see the confirm capture and cancel methods these work similar to update api calls but use a special api path and perform a specific action on an underlying object when we veer away from the standard create retrieve update delete and list operations the custom method names follow a verb naming convention so for instance we have dispute dot close payment intent dot confirm charge.capture etc the client library will expose access to custom methods in a predictable way using a name that matches the verb seen in the api reference all right so to demonstrate custom methods let's first create and then confirm a payment intent and we're going to talk about custom methods now so first create a payment intent to confirm so we're going to do this we're going to say payment intent create params params is equal to payment intent create params.builder dot build and we want to say set amount and we're gonna pass in 1 000 so that we charge 10 and set currency equal to uh usd again we need our try catch block here so we're going to say payment intent and intent it's equal to payment intent.create params and i'll break this up so we can see it and we're gonna just print out the intent dot get id let's also print the status for the payment intent and if there's an error print that up okay so let's run our request we've created a payment intent there's its id it is in the requires payment method status so when we create a payment intent by default like this it doesn't actually confirm the payment intent so this you've we've seen all this before um we are just cr we're creating a payment intent which is another object in the stripe api again just with scalars at the at the top level here but the the trick here and what i want to show you is the second step which is confirm the payment intent one of the custom methods for the payment intent resource is called confirm so we have created a payment intent now we need to confirm the payment intent the confirmation happens on a special endpoint that is not one of the standard crud actions so we're not going to create read update delete or list anything in this case we are confirming an instance of a payment intent so we have a predictable set of verbs which align with those cases where we're veering away from the standard crud operation so we're going to say payment intent confirm params is equal to payment intent confirm params.builder dot build and in this case we want to set the payment method to that pm card visa and this is going to be again our test card similar to the delete call which happens on an instance of an object when we are calling custom methods with stripe java we first need to retrieve the object retrieve an instance of the object and then take an action on that object so i'm going to wrap this again in a try catch but here we're going to say payment intent intent is equal to payment intent dot retrieve and we're going to pass in that payment intent id that we just for the payment intent that we just created so copying this id so we've retrieved a payment intent so now we're going to call confirm on that and that will return another payment intent and we'll call this like confirmed intent and this equals intent.confirm and we pass in the params to the confirm method here we're going to print out the confirmed intent get id just so we can see that it's the same payment intent id and that should have a new status of succeeded all right so if we run this we should see that no longer does it require a payment method because it has succeeded so this is how we confirm the payment intent and again the trick here is that this confirm method is a custom method or we call it a custom method because it it is not one of the standard crud methods and this is how you can make calls to those custom methods with stripe java some api endpoints are nested under higher level resources so for example when working with a list of lines for an invoice those are accessible through a path which includes the id of the invoice like so sometimes accessing these nested resources requires first fetching an instance of the parent resource in this case an invoice and then second making an api call to list its lines let's take a look all right so next let's talk about nested service method so sometimes the items that you want to work with are nested inside of some parent resource or some top level resource so one case of this in the api is when you're working with the line items on an invoice so in this case what we want to do is retrieve the line items for a specific invoice and that is going to be using a nested service method so nested service methods move that up to the top here so the params for this are going to look interesting so we're going to have an invoice so that is the top level parent resource that we're working with and then its child resource is called a line item and it will be returning a collection from a list endpoint and these are going to be the params so params so invoice line item collection params.builder dot build so we're again using this builder pattern what we want to do here is set the limit to 5 so that we only get five line items returned so first again we're going to retrieve an instance of that invoice or of an invoice we can say invoice is equal to invoice.retrieve and then we want to pass in an invoice id let's grab one of those from the stripe cli so i'm going to say stripe invoices list limit one i'm going to pipe that to jq and grab the id from the json that's returned all right so we've got an invoice id here from this invoice we can call get lines and then the list method on those lines to get back an invoice line item collection so the return type here is invoice line item collection and it's called we'll name the variable lines and this is a method on the invoice so invoice.getlines dot list and then we pass in the params for retrieving that list of line items on the invoice so under the hood this is making a call to v1 invoices slash i n x x where i n x x is this invoice id and that is the parent resource and then slash lines and then because we're setting the limit here to five that is going to add a query string parameter of limit equals five and the objects that we get back is this collection of line items for um for this list so first thing we can do is just print out like the invoice dot get id just to confirm that we're getting the uh the invoice that we expect and we can also just like print out the lines and if any of that fails we can just print out the error all right so let's give this a whirl and we're using a nested service method with stripe java to retrieve the line items all right so here we go we've got back the line items for this invoice and it shows us sort of the breakdown of each individual line item on the invoice how much it costs what the description is of the invoice item its id etc etc so that's how we work with nested service methods thus far our examples have passed data into the client library methods and the client library has form encoded and sent those values to the stripe api either as part of the request body or in the query string params let's turn to passing configuration options in the request headers headers are most commonly used for authentication versioning and stripe connect you'll want to refer to the authentication episode to learn about how api keys are passed or to the versioning episode about how to specify the api version in the headers either globally or per request so the particular use case i want to cover briefly here is for stripe connect connect enables you to build a platform to facilitate payments for other sellers or vendors users connect their stripe account to your stripe account and then you can make api calls on their behalf once connected this works by passing the id of the connected account in the http headers let's take a look at how to pass the connect account id header all right so far we've talked about how to pass in data in the query string params for our listing and filtering lists we've talked about passing data in the request body for creating and updating objects confirming using these custom service methods or custom methods and these nested service methods now let's talk about how we can pass in some request params or how we can configure the the headers for our request so that we can use features like stripe connect or passing a per request api version or per request api key so here what we're going to talk about is passing request params in the headers okay so we're going to again create a customer but this time we're going to create that customer on a connected stripe account and the way that works is we pass the id of the connect account in the headers in the request header so we're going to say customer create params params is equal to customer createparams.builder so this is stuff that we've seen before we're creating a customer object we're passing a scalar value for the email address something that we haven't yet seen before is working with request options so let's do that now we're going to say request options is a new ins a new variable request options and that's equal to request options dot builder not build and we're gonna set the stripe uh account equal to the string value for a stripe account id okay so i've set that in uh or so i've created this new instance of a request request options object now i need to pass that when i'm creating the customer so um we have this first argument which is params and then a second argument here which is request options and that will configure the request header to contain so that it contains this stripe account id this connected account id and what will end up happening is a new customer will be created rather than this customer being created on my stripe account it'll be created on the this connected account so rather than on the platform account this is going to be on this stripe connect account all right let's give this a whirl okay there we go we've created a customer this connected account id will be passed in the request headers of the post request to create the customer all right so that's how we use request options with stripe java to configure the headers that are sent as part of the request as a quick recap in this episode you learn how to make requests to the stripe api to create retrieve update delete and list resources we looked at the api reference documentation covered custom methods nested services and passing request headers for connect thanks so much for watching we'll see in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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