NAME

Business::USPS::WebTools - This is the description

SYNOPSIS

use Business::USPS::WebTools;

DESCRIPTION

*** THIS IS ALPHA SOFTWARE ***

This is the base class for the WebTools web service from the US Postal Service. The USPS offers several services, and this module handles the parts common to all of them: making the request, getting the response, parsing error reponses, and so on. The interesting stuff happens in one of the subclasses which implement a particular service. So far, the only subclass in this distribution is Business::USPS::WebTools::AddressVerification.

new( ANONYMOUS_HASH )

Make the web service object. Pass is an anonymous hash with these keys:

UserID		the user id provided by the USPS
Password	the password provided by the USPS
Testing		true or false, to select the right server

If you don't pass the UserID or Password entries, new looks in the environment variables USPS_WEBTOOLS_USERID and USPS_WEBTOOLS_PASSWORD.

If new cannot find both the User ID and the Password, it croaks.

userid

Returns the User ID for the web service. You need to get this from the US Postal Service.

password

Returns the Password for the web service. You need to get this from the US Postal Service.

url

Returns the URL for the request to the web service. So far, all requests are GET request with all of the data in the query string.

response

Returns the response from the web service. This is the slightly modified response. So far it only fixes up line endings and normalizes some error output for inconsistent responses from different physical servers.

is_error

Returns true if the response to the last request was an error, and false otherwise.

If the response was an error, this method sets various fields in the object:

$self->{error}{number}      
$self->{error}{source}      
$self->{error}{description} 
$self->{error}{help_file}   
$self->{error}{help_context}

SEE ALSO

The WebTools API is documented on the US Postal Service's website:

http://www.usps.com/webtools/htm/Address-Information.htm

SOURCE AVAILABILITY

This source is part of a SourceForge project which always has the latest sources in CVS, as well as all of the previous releases.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/brian-d-foy/

If, for some reason, I disappear from the world, one of the other members of the project can shepherd this module appropriately.

AUTHOR

brian d foy, <bdfoy@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2006, brian d foy, All Rights Reserved.

You may redistribute this under the same terms as Perl itself.