Flutter error: We appreciate your patience. While we fix this continue browsing on the app

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Summary

A production payment integration with Razorpay in a Flutter app was failing due to an incorrect field in the payload sent to the Razorpay checkout. The specific field order_id was manually populated, conflicting with Razorpay’s API expectation to generate this identifier server-side or automatically. The resolution involved removing the order_id key from the options dictionary passed to the client-side checkout initialization. This allowed Razorpay to handle the session generation correctly, resolving the “We appreciate your patience” error message and enabling successful transactions.

Root Cause

The root cause was a client-side payload error where a mutable field in the payment options dictionary was populated with an internal application order reference. Razorpay’s client-side SDK expects a clean initialization; passing an order_id that does not correspond to a valid Razorpay server-side order creation triggers a validation failure.

  • Invalid Field Presence: The order_id key was included in the options map passed to RazorpayCheckout.open().
  • ID Mismatch: The value used (likely _currentOrder.orderId) is a database identifier internal to the application, not a Razorpay-issued order ID.
  • API Protocol Violation: Razorpay expects the order_id to be generated via their Orders API. If sent client-side, it violates the integration flow.

Why This Happens in Real Systems

In real-world systems, this issue arises during rapid prototyping or legacy code migration. Developers often hardcode or mix local state identifiers with external API fields to speed up the development cycle.

  1. Documentation Ambiguity: Developers often misinterpret “optional” fields in SDK documentation as “passthrough” fields for any data.
  2. State Management Leakage: Application-level state (like a local orderId) is often injected directly into UI-layer models without transformation.
  3. Legacy Integration: Systems migrating from older payment gateways that allowed client-side ID mapping may attempt to map existing logic to Razorpay without verifying the API contract.

Real-World Impact

  • Transaction Failure: Users are presented with a generic error message (“We appreciate your patience…”) rather than a specific validation error, leading to high drop-off rates.
  • Support Overhead: Customer support teams are flooded with vague tickets about “payment errors,” making triage difficult because the client-side logs only show a generic failure.
  • Data Integrity Issues: If the internal order_id were somehow accepted (though unlikely), it could lead to reconciliation nightmares where external transaction logs do not match internal order IDs.
  • Loss of Revenue: Every failed transaction represents lost revenue and a potential churn of the customer.

Example or Code

The following Dart code demonstrates the incorrect implementation versus the correct implementation. Note the absence of order_id in the corrected payload.

// INCORRECT IMPLEMENTATION
// Passing an internal order ID causes Razorpay to reject the request
Map getIncorrectOptions(String merchantId, double amount, String internalOrderId) {
  return {
    'key': merchantId,
    'amount': (amount * 100).toInt(),
    'name': 'My App',
    'currency': 'INR',
    'description': 'Payment for Order',
    'order_id': internalOrderId, // <--- CAUSE OF ERROR
    'prefill': {
      'contact': '9876543210',
      'email': 'user@example.com'
    },
  };
}

// CORRECT IMPLEMENTATION
// Let Razorpay handle the ID generation
Map getCorrectOptions(String merchantId, double amount) {
  return {
    'key': merchantId,
    'amount': (amount * 100).toInt(),
    'name': 'My App',
    'currency': 'INR',
    'description': 'Payment for Order',
    // 'order_id' is omitted here
    'prefill': {
      'contact': '9876543210',
      'email': 'user@example.com'
    },
  };
}

How Senior Engineers Fix It

Senior engineers fix this by enforcing API contract adherence and separation of concerns.

  1. Immediate Removal: The order_id key is stripped from the client-side payload immediately.
  2. Server-Side Verification: If order tracking is required, the senior engineer ensures the client sends the internal_order_id only as a metadata field (if supported by the provider) or uses a webhook system to correlate Razorpay’s generated ID with the internal ID upon success.
  3. Abstraction Layer: They create a dedicated PaymentMapper class. This class maps internal domain objects to strictly typed DTOs (Data Transfer Objects) that match the Payment Gateway’s schema. This prevents internal state (like _currentOrder.orderId) from leaking into the API request.
  4. Defensive Coding: They implement validation logic that strips unknown or restricted fields before serialization.

Why Juniors Miss It

Junior developers often miss this issue because they treat the payment options map as a generic “key-value bag” rather than a strictly typed API contract.

  • Lack of Debugging Tools: Juniors may not know how to intercept the HTTP traffic generated by the SDK to see exactly what JSON is being sent to the gateway.
  • Assumption of Passthrough: They assume that any data added to the options object will simply be “passed through” or ignored if not needed, rather than causing a fatal validation error.
  • Focus on Syntax over Semantics: They focus on making the code run without errors (syntactical correctness) rather than understanding the payment protocol (semantic correctness).
  • Over-reliance on “Magic” SDKs: They expect the SDK to sanitize inputs or automatically map internal IDs, not realizing the SDK is a thin wrapper over HTTP requests.