Concepts

Term	Meaning
Organisation	A customer of CardOffice. All data belongs to exactly one organisation, and an API key is bound to one.
Card holder	A person who needs a card. A card holder cannot sign in to the portal.
External ID	Your identifier for the person (student number, staff number). Unique within an organisation.
Photo	An image of a card holder. Each holder has at most one current approved photo.
Issued card	A specific credential a holder has held, with a serial number, a verification code, an issue number and a lifecycle. One holder has many issued cards over time.
Issue number	Which number credential this is for that person. It is set when the credential is created, not incremented per print attempt.
Order	A request to produce cards for one or more holders.
Order item	One credential within an order.
Print job	One attempt to print an item. A spoiled print makes a new job, not a new item.
Template version	An immutable, locked card design. Reprinting last year’s card reproduces last year’s card.
Bureau	CardOffice itself acting as the printer for organisations that do not print their own.
Agent	An on-site program (print, encoder or sync) that connects outbound to the portal.
Scope	A permission attached to an API key, such as card_holders:read.

Order lifecycle

draft ──► submitted ──► in_production ──► printed ──► shipped ──► completed
  │           │               │
  └───────────┴───────────────┴──► cancelled

Through the API you can move an order to submitted or cancelled. Production statuses are set by the print room.

Holder statuses

active, inactive and archived. A card verifies only while the card is live, the holder is active, and the card has not passed its expiry date.