Retrieve Sales Tax Rates Programmatically From Web?

[Anthony Watson]

Washington state recently switched to "destination based" sales tax, and I would like to update my database program to access the current rate for a location using their web service. For example, if I enter the following link in my browser:

http://dor.wa.gov/AddressRates.aspx?...ity=&zip=98607

It returns the rate for that location as well as a variety of additional stats.

Is there a way to retrieve this information programmatically with PowerBASIC, preferably saving it to a string variable I can parse easily?

Thanks,

Anthony

[Joe Byrne]

Search for 'webget'. There are lots of examples.

[Paul Franks]

Your URL doesn't appear to be working at the moment, but here's a basic example for retrieving data from a REST web service:

http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pbforums/showpost.php?p=248291&postcount=6

You can then do some basic XPATH queries on the returned XML object to get your individual data items.

Later...

OK, the site is up, I've attached a basic example with XPATH queries to retrieve the attributes from the XML result. Simple stuff...

[Anthony Watson]

Paul,

Excellent, that works perfectly. Thanks so much!

Anthony

[Paul Franks]

Paul,

Excellent, that works perfectly. Thanks so much!

No problem.

I notice the web service is down again. Web services are great, but only if they stay in service 7/24

[Anthony Watson]

I notice the web service is down again.

I haven't noticed any outages during my tests. It has been working perfectly for me.

In any case, I have the tax lookup merged into my main application now and it seems to work very well with every address I tried. Even if there is an occasional outage, this will make my life MUCH easier for calculating sales taxes.

From what I understand, the change to a destination based tax in Washington is only the start of what will eventually become a nationwide tax system. So, I hope this interface will be expanded to cover other states if and when it becomes a reality.

Anyway, thanks again. This has been a huge help!

Now, I just need to get my act together and finish the rest of my database update.

Anthony

[Paul Franks]

Hmmm... Maybe it doesn't like the fact that I'm not in WA, but I can't even bring up the main DOR site right now.

Be sure to send it some bogus data to see what errors look like (the error results should be documented somewhere on their site), and check for and handle them in your code.

[Paul Franks]

From what I understand, the change to a destination based tax in Washington is only the start of what will eventually become a nationwide tax system. So, I hope this interface will be expanded to cover other states if and when it becomes a reality.

FWIW, there are commercial web services that provide this already for a price. Here's one example:

http://www.strikeiron.com/ProductDetail.aspx?p=350&tab=1