Veda Australia; Ampersands in the Organisation Identification service were not correctly handled

The Veda Australia Organisation Identification service, which is used to search for and select a company, does not handle ampersands correctly. For example, "ABC & XYZ COMPANY PTY LTD" does not work.

The error returned is "SYS type error, description BCA.0001: The Veda system has found that the format or the data of the request to be invalid. Please correct the problem and then resubmit your request.".

To work with Veda correctly, an ampersand, that is usually encoded as "&", needs to be encoded twice, i.e. to "&". In the future Veda may correct this issue and therefore break this behaviour. Alternatively by replacing the ampersand with a space the search will work.

Therefore, to correct this issue, ampersands are replaced with a single space.