Address types

There are three types of addresses that can be returned by the address capture methods:

FormattedAddress

This is a full PAF address in a standard format suitable for saving to your database or for printing.

RawPAFAddress

This is a full PAF address in a structured format. This is not suitable for printing directly, but allows you to access each part of the address directly (e.g. building number, name, street & town components, postcode)

PartialAddress

This is an incomplete address, and is returned from all the methods that allow searching for possible addresses without knowing the exact postcode. Each PartialAddress contains a Description, which allows the user to decide whether the address is the correct one, and an ID which can be supplied to another method to retrieve further details. The IDs returned from the FindAddress, AddressesByStreet and AddressesByLocality methods can be supplied to the FetchAddress method to retrieve the associated FormattedAddress, or the FetchRawAddress method to retrieve the associated RawPAFAddress.

Your account is only charged when calling methods that return a full address (either a FormattedAddress or RawPAFAddress). Methods that return only a PartialAddress are not chargeable. You are only charged for these addresses when you fetch the full address.

View Address Capture Overview