Dummy Shipments for Address Validation

[MarcoWel]

DHL Parcel and other carriers allow to use the CreateShipment API with a dummy flag. This allows to dry-run a shipment without actually creating a paid label, which can be used as a proper way to validate a destination address with this carrier or test a certain shipment configuration.

Please expose this functionality within karrio by adding a dry_run flag to the shipments endpoint.

[ChrisNolan]

The system already supports a full 'test mode'. Would this give you what you need?

Address Validation on its own is also a separate step.

What part of the 'shipment configuration' do you see that would require a full label creation that isn't covered by the 'rate shopping'?

[MarcoWel]

• Test Mode: This uses carrier's sandbox API endpoints meant for dev testing. This is not meant to do address validation in production.
• There is a validate_location flag in the address creation endpoint, but it is not really documented and does not seem to do anything in code yet.
• For the rate request endpoint, it does not neccessarily hit the carrier's API. Carriers like DHL Paket do not provide a rating API, so karrio relies on rate sheets which in turn do not throw any errors if the address is incorrect. Also a carrier API might be more tolerant for bad addresses in rating compared to the actual label creation.

As address/shipment validation is carrier specific and can depend on many things (is the service available for the specific location, is the address valid for the selected carrier and service, are all provided details valid etc), there should be support for a simple "dry-run" for a label as many carriers offer it in their API.

[ChrisNolan]

Thanks. I've been doing Fedex mostly lately and they have their 'Validate Shipment' as a separate step after the 'Validate Address'... but look at that, karrio isn't doing anything with that end point either. That would fit here I'd think too.

• https://developer.fedex.com/wirc/browser/#operation/ShipmentPackageValidate