Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

AddressDoctor Web Services

Q: How long does it take to get access to the AddressDoctor system?
A: Access to the AddressDoctor eCommerce system is available within minutes. Simply create a user account yourself and you can start right away.

Q: What service levels do you offer?
A: Our standard service level includes 99% availability. With special service level agreements (SLA) we can also guarantee 99.5% and 99.7% availability for a surcharge.

Q: What are the average response times of the system?
A: The response time of the system depends on different factors: The quality of the input file, transfer quality, load on AddressDoctor servers, size of request and response files, as well as size and type of enrichment, influence the response time of the system.
A request to the Interactive Web Service typically takes about 25ms to process on the AddressDoctor system. Depending on your Internet connectivity and packet trip times you may experience response times between 75ms and 250ms for each request. The FastCompletion and Batch Web Services offer similar response times. However, batches of several addresses submitted to the Batch Web Service may take somewhat longer.

Q: What character set does the AddressDoctor Web Service use?
A: The AddressDoctor Web Service accepts requests in the UTF-8 character set.

Q: The Web Service returns some of my data in uppercase letters. Why does this happen?
A: The AddressDoctor Web Service will always return the data in a casing as described by the postal organizations of the destination country. So data for the UK or the US for instance, is always returned in upper case.

Q: I receive a server error 500. What is the cause?
A: The AddressDoctor Web Service will return an error 500 (server error) if the request is malformed. Most common reasons are wrong casing (all tags are case sensitive), incorrect casing of the URL embedded in the request or missing or incomplete tags such as a missing department (must be set to 0). Please make sure that your request is compatible with the WSDL available at http://validator2.addressdoctor.com

Q: I am submitting data with accents (e. g. é)
or umlauts (e. g. ü) and do not receive a meaningful response. What is wrong?
A: Most likely your request is improperly encoded. The AddressDoctor Web Service requires UTF-8 encoding. If you are not using a SOAP toolkit, please make sure that you are using the correct HTTP header (Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8) and that the encoding of your data is proper. You can find an article about character encoding at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnxml/html/xmlencodings.asp

Q: The Webservice returns the error message: "The string was not recognized as a valid Boolean value"
A: The AddressDoctor Webservice is case-sensitive. You need to deliver all Boolean values in all lower case like "false" or "true".