How to integrate SmartyStreet into OneShield

Anyone who works in or for the insurance industry is quite familiar with the benefits of address verification for the industry. Benefits such as improved risk assessment, prevention of premium leaks, optimization of operations and, most importantly, improved data quality, make selecting a good credit verification software addresses is really important.

In this article, I would like to talk about the integration of one such software – SmartyStreet with OneShield, which I think is the best address validation software I have found so far and therefore recommended to my client. SmartyStreet brings many advantages to its clients, some of them are:

Improved quality of address data due to USPS and international address verification feature.
Option of online searches and web service calls.
Eliminate the time and effort spent updating data
Unlimited calls at a REALLY affordable price.
Does not require maintenance.
Accessible by multiple users
secure processing
You can validate multiple addresses on one page like Risk, Mail and Billing etc.
In addition to the reason mentioned above, its benefits like reduced downtime and final response time (yes, I’m talking about a fraction of a second here!) which helps us not only in our production environment, but also to provide the best to our customers.

So, knowing that you are already convinced of the goodness of the application, let’s quickly understand how we can integrate it with OneShield.

Step 1: Go to the SmartyStreet website, click Resources – Documentation and choose the Cloud API Reference and Website Plugin.

How the website plugin works: It sends the request to SmartyStreet as soon as the user starts typing the address in the address field, a predefined popup suggesting matching addresses appears on the UI.

The website plugin provides us with a standard JavaScript file, which anyone can use. However, it does have some installation requirements; Please find the picture below for your reference.

As you can see, it requires JQuery 1.5.1 or later, and if you are a OneShield developer, you should be aware that OneShield also uses JQuery version 1.4.2 for the 4.19.XX major version, and there is a challenge to integrate! the SmartyStreet plugin!

To address this issue, we downloaded and modified the SmartyStreet JS file (see the highlighted portion of the image shared below) to be compatible with the OneShield JQuery 1.4.2 framework and included the file on the website.

It is very important to note that you need to replace “YOUR_WEBSITE_KEY_HERE” (see image above) with a website key (provided by SmartyStreet) for the website you are installing the plugin on; otherwise, they will invalidate the request.

Now, depending on the environment (Dev/QA/Production), we create different keys – the functionality available with SmartyStreet. These per-environment keys can be held in the system attribute and read at runtime each time your plugin is loaded.

Let’s now move on to the Cloud API reference, where we call the web services using HTTPS or HTTP and retrieve the information.

If you review the generated HTML page from OneShield, it includes the necessary javascript files at the start and that is custom functionality and cannot be modified. To include the SmartyStreet plugin file, we use the Page_Layout_Cell setting to include the modified js file.

We then pass in the necessary data to identify the address fields in the UI and invoke the entry point from the SmartyStreet js plugin file. This plugin then identifies the address component in the UI. Now, when the user starts typing at address line 1, it internally inserts the entered file capture data into the UI and the ajax request is sent to the SmartyStreet web interface. In return, the first 10 (this can be configured as how many return records to expect) matching records in JSON format. These records are then displayed in the dropdown list that is attached to the address line 1 field in the user interface. This is all done from the plugin provided by SmartyStreet.

This would help us determine:

Whether the entered address is valid or invalid.
The user also had the ability to accept an invalid address entered

On the screen above, the user can select Return and the system brand address is invalid or the user can select Use As Is and the system brand address is accepted

3. SmartyStreet also identifies if the entered address needs apartment information and that popup to enter that information

4. Smarty Street also identifies the entered address as ambiguous and provides a selection for the correct address

5. Once the address is verified, the verification button mark below the zip code turns green

The user can switch from checking to not checking by selecting Undo from the same image.

This clears the zip field and the address mark entered as verified

In the verified address, once the user changes any of the address fields, such as address line 1/state/city/zip, that address is marked as unverified

Now when the user changes city

* One thing to note is that your machine will directly send the request to SmartyStreet without your app server in the middle (until you hit the submit button), so make sure you remove any filters or blocks, otherwise your client HTTPS site calls fail.

In addition to making the process easier and better for our client, we were able to use a great deal of money, leaving them delighted. Give it a try and contact us if you need help integrating it with your app.

Hope this helps and happy reading!

PS: We are not partners/suppliers of SmartyStreet and speak only based on our experience.