Person Records
A Person record (also called a Registry Person, or simply a Person) represents one physical human being within your CO. It is the central object in Registry — enrollment flows create it, pipelines populate it, provisioning targets consume it, and status calculations are derived from it.
For the full technical reference, see Registry People in the Technical Manual.
1. What a Person Record Contains
The Person record itself carries relatively few top-level attributes — its role is to serve as the anchor for a collection of related objects. Most person-level data is stored in multi-valued related records so that, for example, a single person can have more than one name, more than one identifier, or more than one email address.
In the Registry administrative interface, all of a Person’s data is displayed on the Person Canvas Redesigned in v5 — a single screen that brings together the attributes listed below alongside the person’s group memberships, linked External Identities, Authenticator status, and provisioning history. The Canvas is the primary workspace for administrators managing individual People.
- Names
Every Person must have at least one name, and exactly one name must be designated as the primary name. Names can be encoded in any language or character set. The primary name is the one used by Registry in display, provisioning, and identifier generation contexts.
Names can also be typed — for example, to distinguish an official name from a preferred name. Each name type can be configured to reflect how your organization handles naming.
- Identifiers
Identifiers are the values used to identify a Person in external systems and to facilitate application integration. A Person can have any number of identifiers of any number of types.
Registry can assign identifiers automatically (via Identifier Assignment) or they can be entered manually. It is strongly recommended to configure at least one automatically assigned identifier to serve as the person’s primary Registry identifier. See Identifier Assignment for configuration details.
Identifiers of a given type must be unique within the CO. An identifier can be suspended rather than deleted to prevent it from being reassigned.
- Email Addresses
Registry tracks email addresses and allows multiple addresses per person, each with a type. Common types include:
Official — the address to use in directory entries and for sending Registry-generated messages to the person
Personal — alternate addresses for delivery or forwarding
Delivery — the delivery mailbox location
Forwarding — an address to forward mail to
Mailing List — the priority address used by mailing list plugins
Email addresses can be verified from within Registry using an Enrollment Flow with an Email Verifier step.
- Addresses
Physical mailing addresses can be attached to a Person record, each with a type (official, home, postal, etc.).
- Telephone Numbers
One or more telephone numbers can be attached, each with a type (office, mobile, fax, etc.).
- URLs
One or more URLs can be attached, with types such as official or personal homepage.
- Ad Hoc Attributes
Registry supports storing arbitrary key-value attributes on Person records via the Ad Hoc Attribute feature. These can be used to capture information that does not fit the standard data model.
- Date of Birth
An optional field on the Person object itself.
- Pronouns
An optional field for preferred pronouns.
2. Person Status
A Person’s status is a calculated value derived from the statuses of the Person’s Roles. Registry takes the most favorable active status across all of the person’s roles to determine the overall Person status.
This means that changing a Role’s status — whether manually, via an expiration policy, or via a pipeline — can change the Person’s status. A person with one Active role and one Expired role will have an overall Person status of Active.
The one exception is Locked status, which overrides all role statuses and applies directly to the Person record.
For the full explanation of status values and how they interact, see Status and Validity.
3. Managing Person Records
- Viewing a Person
From the People listing, select a person to open the Person Canvas. The canvas shows all attributes, roles, group memberships, External Identities, authenticators, and provisioning status in a single view.
- Editing Attributes
Most person-level attributes can be edited from the Person Canvas. Click the edit control next to the attribute type you wish to modify (names, identifiers, email addresses, etc.).
- Adding and Removing Values
Because most attributes are multi-valued, you can add additional names, identifiers, email addresses, etc. from the Person Canvas without replacing existing values.
- Assigning Identifiers on Demand
If Identifier Assignment is configured, an Assign Identifiers button is available on the Person Canvas to trigger identifier generation for the person immediately. See Identifier Assignment.
- Viewing History
Each modification to a Person record generates a History Record. The full history of changes to a person’s record is viewable from the Person Canvas and provides an audit trail of who changed what and when.
- Reprovisioning
An administrator can manually trigger reprovisioning of a Person to any or all configured Provisioning Targets from the Person Canvas.
4. Searching and Listing People
The People listing provides search and filter tools for finding people within the CO. You can search by name, identifier, or email address, and filter by status or COU.
For large COs, searching is strongly preferred over browsing the full list, which can become very long.
5. Changes from v4
CoPerson was renamed to Person in Registry v5.0.0. The underlying concept is the same; only the terminology changed.
Enrollment-state statuses (Approved, Confirmed, Declined, Denied, Duplicate, Invited, Pending, PendingApproval, PendingConfirmation, PendingVetting) are no longer tracked on Person records as of v5.2.0. In v5.2.0 and later, these states are tracked at the Enrollment Flow petition level, not on the Person object. Person status values are limited to the operational statuses: Active, Grace Period, Suspended, Expired, Pending Activation, Archived, and Locked.
Pronouns are a new attribute on the Person record in v5.
The v4 Deleted status is now Archived in v5.0.0.