A few words about the serial-number attribute

Posted by Jacob Moon, Google Checkout Team

Every synchronous and asynchronous message generated by Google Checkout includes an attribute called serial-number in the root element as shown here:

  <request-received
    xmlns="http://checkout.google.com/schema/2" 
    serial-number="58ea39d3-025b-4d52-a697-418f0be74bf9"/>

  <new-order-notification 
    xmlns="http://checkout.google.com/schema/2" 
    serial-number="841171949013218-00001-7">

Each message that you receive from us will have a unique serial-number (with the exception for duplicate notifications that we retry to send out in case of notification failures). Please bear in mind that although these serial numbers are unique, for every notification that you receive, they are not formatted consistently and can actually vary as in the examples above (i.e. "841171949013218-00001-7" vs "58ea39d3-025b-4d52-a697-418f0be74bf9").

The bottom line: you can trust that the ID number of a serial-number is unique, but don't make any assumptions or inferences about the format of the ID presented in the serial-number attribute.

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