Introduction

DOTS Address Detective (“AD”) is a phone and name-assisted address validation tool. When an address does not resolve, additional clues such as having a phone number or name can help determine an address for the contact. Without these clues, or if these clues do not produce a hit, the service has the same functionality as our DOTS Address Validation – US products. A score is used to give an idea of how likely it is that this address is correct for this contact. This service utilizes the latest .Net Framework, WCF, and can be used as a RESTful service or with SOAP. 

AD can provide instant address verification and correction to websites or enhancement to contact lists.

Resources

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Quick Lookups

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Developer Guide Map

  • Operations
    This section lists the DOTS Address Detective (“AD”) operations and goes into the details behind the inputs and outputs.
    Operations:
  • Codes, Notes, Correction
    This section shows additional supporting data tables for the DPV and Correction code values returned by DOTS Email Validation operations.
  • 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 web site.
  • Try The API
    This is where you’ll go to take the API for a spin. There you can test our recommended operation GetAddressInsight.
  • 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 AD 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.

AD is a public XML web service that supports SOAP, POST and GET operations, using RESTful paradigms or simple HTTP transport calls.


The host path, or physical location of the web service is here:

https://trial.serviceobjects.com/ad/api.svc


A test page for the web service can be found here:

https://trial.serviceobjects.com/ad/


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/ad/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 AD, 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.