Introduction

DOTS Address Validation Canada 2 (AVCA2) is a publicly available XML web service that provides parsed and corrected information about a physical Canadian address. The service provides corrected information such as the correct street location and postal code as well as address fragments and locational metadata.

AVCA2 can provide instant address verification and correction to websites or enhancement to contact lists. However, the output from AVCA2 must be considered carefully before the existence or non-existence of an address is decided.

If you are an existing client and are using the previous version of this service then please click on the following link.

DOTS Address Validation CA

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Sample Data

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Developer Guide Map

  • Operations
    This section lists the DOTS Address Validation – Canada 2 operations and goes into the details behind the inputs and outputs.
    Operations:
  • Delivery Mode and Correction Codes
    Displays more information about delivery mode values and corrections codes that are provided by DOTS Address Validation – Canada 2.
  • Errors
    This section reflects details on the error outputs that can happen with the service.
  • Code Snippets and Sample Code
    Here you’ll find code snippets for various programming languages and frameworks along with links to our sample code page on the website.
  • Try The API
    This is where you’ll go to take the API for a spin. There you can test our recommended operation ValidateCanadianAddressV2.
  • Service Reference
    In this section, you’ll find all the different endpoints supported by this service, input and output schema information as well as an opportunity to try the other endpoints as well.
  • Frequently Asked Questions
    This is a list of some of the questions we hear more often that you can reference and get answers on right away.

Integration Basics

Integrating AVCA2 into your application should be easy and straightforward. If you are using a common platform, Service Objects may already have sample code built that you can use: https://www.serviceobjects.com/developers/sample-code/ 

However, if you are using a common platform that does not already have sample code, you can ask Service Objects to build you an example. Email support@serviceobjects.com for more details.


Web Service Structure:

Web services are methods that integrate with other applications via the web, and encapsulate tricky business logic. Web services are too large of a topic to cover in this document, but Service Objects has developed its web services to be as easy to integrate and as accessible as possible. AVCA is a public XML web service that supports SOAP, POST and GET operations.


The host path, or physical location of the web service is here: 
https://trial.serviceobjects.com/avca2/api.svc


A test page for the recommended operation can be found here:
AVCA2 – Try The API


See the service references and try the other operations here:
AVCA2 – Service Reference


The location of the WSDL, or Web Service Definition Language document, is here (This is also accessible via the “Service Definition” link.): 
https://trial.serviceobjects.com/avca2/api.svc?WSDL

Important Notes!

  1. This XML is the definition of the web service, meaning its inputs, outputs, operations, and the like.  Most likely, you will have another tool read this WSDL and make the operations available to you in your application.  Whenever your utilities or IDE asks for a WSDL path to AV-CA, you can provide this one.
  2. SOAP is done via POST, only with special XML markup in the post-body.

Every web service has operations that it offers to subscribers – methods that do different work and return different output.  Examining the link above, you will notice several of these operations available, which are described in detail later on.