Party glossary.

Work in progress.

Please add terms that need to be explained!

Party

A Party is something in real life in the legal sense, something you can sue or "interested parties". This can be an individual or something more complicated such as an organisation or household. Data about a party is normally stored in many different places and the Party module helps to consolidate all that information in one place. Therefore the party entity should map to a "thing in real life".

A Party entity does not have bundles and normally has no fields. It is simply a wrapper around other entities representing whatever, e.g. a Drupal User, CiviCRM Constituant, Facebook account, eCommerce Customer, Employee profile, etc. A Party may wrap one or more such entities.

Hat

There are many different types of people in the real world. However unlike content types, parties are more dynamic. People can have multiple hats for different situations and they tend to change over time. Therefore instead of party types we have party hats which are similar to types but, like their real life counter part, a party can have multiple hats at one time, these hats can change over time and they have hierachy.

A Hat defines a Party type, specifying a subset of available Data Sets, if the Hat is required, access rules and (eventually) the associated Drupal user roles. For example, a Party with a Teacher Hat can edit the data of a Party having a Student Hat, but not visa-versa.

data set