Alright, so I’ve been messing around with getting my PayPal transactions into other apps, you know, for budgeting and stuff. It’s a pain to do it manually, so I looked into this thing called Yodlee. Heard it could automatically pull in the data. Here’s how it went down:
First, I signed up for a Yodlee developer account. It’s free for the basic stuff, which is all I needed. They have a whole “sandbox” environment where you can test things out without messing with real money, pretty sweet.
Once I was in, I muddled my way through their API documentation. I am not professional * wasn’t the easiest thing to understand, had all these terms like “cobrand,” “user,” “access tokens”… Took me a bit to wrap my head around it all.
I figured out I needed to create a “cobrand” login first. That’s like the main account for your app. Then, I could create a “user” under that. It’s like setting up a master account and then sub-accounts, I guess.
The trickiest part was getting the authentication right. Yodlee uses these “JWT tokens” for security. You have to generate them, send them in the right format, and handle them expiring. Took me a while, a good afternoon of trial and error, and some googling,I finally got it.
- Created a cobrand session.
- Registered a user.
- Generated JWT.
Next, I dug into the part about linking PayPal. I learned to Yodlee, PayPal is just another “provider.” It has a specific ID * I used their “FastLink” tool. It’s basically a pre-built interface that handles the whole login and linking process for you, which made it much simpler.
I embedded FastLink into a simple HTML page I made. When I loaded it up, it showed the PayPal login screen.I input my personal paypal account’s user name and password, It worked! I just needed to follow the steps and Yodlee took care of connecting my account.
After that, I made some API calls to actually fetch the transactions. You have to specify the date range and all that. The data came back in this “JSON” format, which is basically a structured text file. Not super pretty, but I could see all my transactions there!
My Summary:
I spent maybe two days on this, on and off. It’s not super polished, but it’s working! I can automatically pull my PayPal transactions. I think I need to learn a bit more about handling errors and making it more robust, but for a quick and dirty solution, it’s pretty good.I can now start building my budgeting app.