This article contains content about advanced functionality within the Evident platform. If you have not already familiarized yourself with base functionality, we recommend doing so first. Base functionality is sufficient for the majority of use cases and scenarios that you will encounter as an Evident customer. That being said, there may be some scenarios where you need to employ more advanced features of the Evident platform. To be able to fully leverage these advanced features, a deeper understanding of the Evident platform and of your own integration is required. The purpose of all the articles in the Advanced Functionality series is designed to help guide you to this deeper understanding.
Different Kinds of Output Attributes
In this article we explain how, at the highest level there are two different kinds of attributes - input attributes and output attributes. To fully understand output attributes, you also need to understand that there are two different types of output attributes. There are "service output attributes" and there are "informational output attributes."
Service Output Attributes
A service output attribute is associated with a specific service, and will let the Evident platform that you want to run that service. As part of running the service, the Evident platform will know to collect certain input attributes from the user. Typically, the fulfillment of a service attribute is considered a 'billable event,' meaning that we trigger a count for billing purposes that you will be charged for later. An example of a service output attribute is a "background check attribute" or the "identity verification attribute." These attributes will always need certain inputs, will tell the Evident platform to run the service, and upon fulfillment are usually tied to a billable event that is tracked within the Evident platform. You are then later invoiced for this billable event.
Informational Output Attributes
Some output attributes will not trigger the collection of input attributes, and will not trigger a service on their own, but instead rely on a service attribute to complete. These are called "informational output attributes." An example of an informational attribute is "Core First Name" or Core Last Name" which requires an identity document verification in order to fulfill. The fulfillment of these attributes is simply for informational purposes for you as a user of the platform, and it is not associated with a billable event.
How Service Output Attributes and Informational Attributes Work Together
Let's look at a real world example to make this easier to understand. If I create a request with the "identity verification attribute," you can see that if you go to the user submission page, the Evident platform knows that an identity document needs to be collected from the user. On the flip side, if I create a request with just "Core First Name" the Evident platform has no way to fulfill this request because the "identity verification attribute" was not included. In that way, some requests that are created may never complete if they are not created with the correct combination of attributes. This is why we normally leverage templates.
You can use the Evident platform to decrypt and view any informational attributes that exist within the collection of encrypted pieces of information that Evident houses for any particular data subject (identified by their email address). As an example, let's say you ran an identity verification on an individual and your integration is set up to only show you the result of "Valid/Invalid." Later, you decided that you'd like to see the front image of the license for some business purpose. You can do this by simply creating a request for the informational attributes. You do not have to include the service attribute on the request for the informational attribute, provided the service attribute was run at a prior time.
Dependencies Between Different Kinds of Attributes
In addition to dependencies between informational and service attributes, there are also complex dependencies between attributes from different services. As an example, sometimes informational output attributes of one service can become an input attribute for another service. The primary example where we see this occur is when the Evident platform pulls the name and date of birth from an identity verification anytime an identity verification on an individual was run previously for a data subject on whom I'm running a background check on today.