Working With Person Data

The Person data object includes complete profile information for a single person, who can be a student, parent, faculty member, and/or constituent. Within the Person class, there are properties for basic information about the person (such as name components, gender, etc.), as well as the EntityNo unique identifier for the person, indicators for which group(s) the person belongs to (e.g. IsParent, IsFaculty), the person’s WebUserID, whether or not the user IsLDAPAuthenticated, and other basic data that varies depending on the type of user. There is also a FamilyID property which is used to group parents and students in a family.

Each person can have multiple addresses, including one or more residential, work, and additional contact addresses. Each address record can include multiple phone numbers and up to 2 email addresses, and also includes publishing preferences for the user with regard to various components of the address data. See User Data Publishing Preferences for more information about how to handle and respect these user preferences.

Person data can be retrieved for individuals using the methods in the UserProfileService, or you can retrieve data for all individuals (or certain subgroups) using the getAllPersons method of the DataExportService (see Bulk Data Retrieval With DataExport for more details). When using methods which retrieve person data, you can optionally choose to include (where applicable) person data for a person’s spouse, and/or for all students (children) associated with the person.

Profile Change Approval Process

Parents and constituents are permitted to make certain changes to addresses and publishing preferences via My BackPack or custom applications. The DataUpdateService includes methods to provide this type of functionality in a custom application (see Updating User Profile Data for more details). Profile updates remain in a ‘pending’ status until approved by the school, at which time changes may be made to the Ascendance database, and the pending record is deleted.

Whenever a parent or constituent has the opportunity to make changes to his/her profile information via My BackPack, he/she has the option of including a note to the school to explain the changes in more detail or to request other changes that cannot be made online. This note only exists for pending address changes (those that have not yet been approved by the school).