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I'm currently polling for new transactions once per hour and having trouble determining if a transaction is new, or if it's an advancement of a previous transaction state.

From what I've seen, as a transaction evolves from it's pending to posted state, it takes on multiple new ids, resulting in an algorithm I've started to write to determine if it's truly a new transaction or not.

Do you all have any suggestions on a pattern for a deterministic algorithm for identifying unique transactions, not based on their id?

I started with an MD5 hash of the amount, date, and payee name, however the payee name has proven to be unreliable as it can change as the transaction evolves in state.

Manas Mukherjee
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mndmatt
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    This is troubling, if indeed the id for a given transaction changes. Relying non the date and amount doesn't seem sufficient. – aceofspades Jun 23 '13 at 15:25
  • Agree 100% - It's disappointing to have this type of data available yet not be able to use it in a meaningful way until after transactions have posted. – mndmatt Jun 28 '13 at 14:44

1 Answers1

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If you get pending transaction then please delete/ignore those transactions. Ids related to these 'pending' transactions are transient in nature. It is not possible to map these temporary transactions by their changeable Ids.

PN - We do not categorize Pending Transaction due to its transient type. We will only categorize posted items.

Thanks

Manas Mukherjee
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  • Interesting, I suspect many users would miss this. I'd almost rather see no id there at all, or maybe pending_id in this case. – aceofspades Jun 28 '13 at 14:56
  • Yup, as the other commenter said, I fell for this one too. Oh well, live and learn. – vinhboy Oct 23 '13 at 14:04