# Chapter 5 - Geocode Offline

Source: https://developer.avalara.com/products/communications/integration-guides/dev-guide_geo_soap/geocode-offline/

-   [Previous Chapter](/communications/dev-guide_geo_soap/reference)
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Designing robust software means planning for every eventuality. To create a world-class product using AFC Geo SaaS Pro Soap, you need to be prepared for when things go wrong - and one of the problems you may face is an outage. Fortunately, there are ways to write your software to gracefully handle an outage.  

Types of connection issues:

-   Temporary Outage: Your connection has gone offline and you need to be able to process geocode requests for a short period of time until the connection is restored
-   Intermittent Connection: Your connection works most of the time, but its behavior is unpredictable and occasionally drops unexpectedly
-   Unable to Reach AFC Geo: Your connection is up, but you are unable to reach AFC Soap because of a routing problem, a denial-of-service attack on an Internet service provider, or a temporary outage of AFC Geo

These types of outages have similar characteristics, so it’s straightforward to design a single process to handle all of them. Here is how we handle a broken connection:

-   Detect the dropped connection and prevent a crash
-   Retry the request or fall back to saved geocoding results

-   [Previous Chapter](/communications/dev-guide_geo_soap/reference)
-   [Next](/communications/dev-guide_geo_soap/geocode-offline/detect-dropped-connection/)