That was an example snippet of code. Here is a tested snippet of code that’s been confirmed to work. You can modify this snippet further for more advanced scenarios.
@onlinekey PayPal doesn’t allow the item name field to be empty, it’s a required field so there must be something there. That’s why in the example, the name is set to the product ID.
If the item name field is blank, PayPal will fail the request because of their internal validations. So, you must put something there.
The example I provided already shows how to set the item’s name. $item->setName() and in the setName function you can add any non-empty value you want.