If you are using an Address Validation service for shipping labels, then you may occasionally run into character limitations with the Address1 field. Whether you are using UPS, Fedex or another shipping solution, most character limits tend to range between 30 or 35 characters. While most addresses tend to be under this limit, there are always outliers that you will want your business solution to be ready to handle.
If you are using a DOTS Address Validation solution, you are in luck! The response from our API allows you to customize address lines to your heart’s content. Whether you are looking to have your address lines be under a certain limit, place apartment or unit information on a separate line, or customize the address line some other way, we will show you how to integrate the Address Validation response from a Service Objects API into your business logic.
Here is a brief example using our DOTS Address Validation 3 solution:
DOTS Address Validation 3 US provides the following fragments in a typical valid response:
FragmentHouse
FragmentPreDir
FragmentStreet
FragmentSuffix
FragmentPostDir
FragmentUnit
Fragment
FragmentPMBPrefix
FragmentPMBNumber
If you are worried about exceeding a certain character limit, first, you can programmatically check the Address1 line to see if it exceeds that particular limit. If it does, then your application can go about splitting up the address in the way that would be the best for your particular application.
For example, let’s say you have a long address line like the following:
12345 W Fake Industrial St NE STE 130, #678
This is obviously a fake street, but it will help us show the different ways to handle long address lines. This address ends up being around 45 characters long, including spaces. The service would return the following fragments for this address:
Fragment House: 12345
FragmentPreDir: W
FragmentStreet: Fake Industrial
FragmentSuffix: St
FragmentPostDir: NE
FragmentUnit: STE
Fragment: 130
FragmentPMBPrefix: #
FragmentPMBNumber: 678
For this particular example, a solution to reduce the character limits would be to move the Suite and Mail Box information to a separate address line so it would appear like so:
12345 W Fake Industrial St NE
STE 130, #678
You may need to fine tune the logic in your business application for this basic algorithm, but this can help you get started with catering your validated address information to different character limitations.
If you have any questions about different integrations into your particular application contact our support team at support@serviceobjects.com and we will gladly provide any support that we can!
