Advanced Settings
Establishing a Connection
The Lyftron Provider for USPS uses these pieces of information in order to authenticate its actions with the USPS service.
- PostageProvider: The postage provider to use to process requests. Available options are ENDICIA and STAMPS. If unspecified, this property will default to ENDICIA.
- UseSandbox: This controls whether live or test requests are sent to the production or sandbox servers. If set to true, the Password, AccountNumber, and StampsUserId properties are ignored.
- StampsUserId: This value is used for logging into authentication to the Stamps servers. This value is not applicable for Endicia and is optional if UseSandbox is true.
- Password: This value is used for logging into Endicia and Stamps servers. If the postage provider is Endicia, this will be the pass phrase associated with your postage account. It is optional if UseSandbox is true.
- AccountNumber: The shipper's account number. It is optional if UseSandbox is true.
- PrintLabelLocation: This property is required to use the GenerateLabels or GenerateReturnLabels stored procedures. This should be set to the folder location where generated labels should be stored.
The Cache Database
Many of the useful task available from USPS require a lot of data. To ensure this data is easy to input and recall later, the CData ADO.NET Provider for USPS 2019 utilizes a cache database to make these requests. You must set the cache connection properties in order to use the CData ADO.NET Provider for USPS 2019:
- CacheLocation: The path to the cache location, for which a connection will be configured with the default cache provider. For example, C:\users\username\documents\uspscache
As an alternative to CacheLocation, set the combination of CacheConnection and CacheProvider to configure a cache connection using a provider separate from the default.
Connecting Through a Firewall or Proxy
HTTP Proxies
To connect through the Windows system proxy, you do not need to set any additional connection properties. To connect to other proxies, set ProxyAutoDetect to false.
In addition, to authenticate to an HTTP proxy, set ProxyAuthScheme, ProxyUser, and ProxyPassword, in addition to ProxyServer and ProxyPort.
Other Proxies
Set the following properties:
- To use a proxy-based firewall, set FirewallType, FirewallServer, and FirewallPort.
- To tunnel the connection, set FirewallType to TUNNEL.
- To authenticate, specify FirewallUser and FirewallPassword.
- To authenticate to a SOCKS proxy, additionally set FirewallType to SOCKS5.
Troubleshooting the Connection
To show provider activity from query execution to network traffic, use Logfile and Verbosity. The examples of common connection errors below show how to use these properties to get more context. Contact the support team for help tracing the source of an error or circumventing a performance issue.
- Authentication errors: Typically, recording a Logfile at Verbosity 4 is necessary to get full details on an authentication error.
- Queries time out: A server that takes too long to respond will exceed the provider's client-side timeout. Often, setting the Timeout property to a higher value will avoid a connection error. Another option is to disable the timeout by setting the property to 0. Setting Verbosity to 2 will show where the time is being spent.