Shipping Module

shipping management - including facilities for collection requests and documentation printing

ExpressConnect shipping customers connect to this TNT application over the Internet to perform a number of activities on submitted consignments.

Consignments can be submitted as XML via an http connection to TNT. The Shipping application enables the customer to ship a consignment (or multiple consignments).

There are four possible activities that can be performed on submitted consignments: create, rate, book and print.

Create
'Create' stores the consignment on the pricing Shipping database for a period of one week (seven days). This eliminates the need to resubmit details and allows the customer to refer to the consignment by consignment number during subsequent processing.

Consignment numbers will be returned if successful.

Rate
Using the same functionality as ExpressConnect pricing, upon successful processing, rates are returned for the submitted consignments (for all available services unless a particular service is specified).

Book
Consignments are sent to the central booking system and a success/fail message returned.

Print
There are four shipping documents available for the customer's submitted consignments: consignment notes, labels, commercial invoice and manifest. These are returned with a style sheet viewable as a document in the customer's browser (this only applies to browsers that support XSL parsing of XML documents).

When the server makes a direct connection to the application, the customer automatically receives a key. This key is associated with five return XML documents retrievable by passing the key to the application. This occurs through a socket 'conversation'.