At Accredible we love attributes. They are the heroes that help make creating and publishing digital credentials incredibly easy. But what are they?
What are Attributes?
Attributes act as placeholders for information on your certificate designs. When you create a credential using a certificate design, the attribute will be automatically replaced with the relevant information required, such as the recipient's name, their course, and the issue date.
This is brilliant because it means you have the potential to be able to publish hundreds of certificates at a time, and every single one will be unique. Instead of having to go back to the certificate design each time and painstakingly change the information on it every time you want to publish a new certificate, attributes do all the hard work for you.
Attributes appear like this on your certificate designs and email templates:
The attribute tells the Accredible system where exactly this information will go on the certificate, but your data upload tells the system what should finally be displayed in place of that attribute.
Which Attributes Can I Use?
There are many pre-made attributes you can use on your certificate designs, such as course name, your organization name, or individual credential properties like the recipient's name. To see all of these in the Certificate Designer, click on the 'Attributes' tab in the left-hand sidebar menu.
If you don't see an attribute for a piece of information that you would like to appear on your credentials, such as a tutor's name or an exam score, you can scroll to the bottom of the list of attributes and click on 'Manage Attributes.'
Manage Attributes
On the 'Manage Attributes' page, you can see an overview of all available attributes, both pre-made and custom-made. To make a new custom attribute click on the 'Add Custom Attribute' button at the top right-hand corner of the page. Fill out the relevant fields in the pop-up window that appears and click 'Add Attribute.' For more information on how to use the Manage Attributes section, check out our article here: Manage Attributes
Types of Attribute
Attributes also have types so that Accredible can ensure your data is going to work properly in every place you want to use it and to give you additional options about how they display. For instance, all of the 'date type' attributes will allow you to choose the date format they will display on the certificates. For more information on image attributes, check out our article here: Image Attributes
How to Use Attributes
To insert an attribute into your design, click on the 'Attributes' tab in the left-hand sidebar menu of the Certificate Designer. Select the attribute you want to add to your certificate design from the attributes menu. You can select any of the attributes you have available including your custom attributes. The menu will also let you know which attributes already appear in the certificate design by having a little blue 'In Use' tag appear next to that particular attribute.
Once you have selected an attribute it will be dropped into the top left-hand corner of your design, ready to be dragged and dropped to where ever you want that information to appear.
Once added to the design, your certificate is ready to receive data for that specific attribute.
Attributes in Action
Here's an example design that uses several attributes:
Here's an example of a spreadsheet with the recipient data filled in and ready to upload.
In the process of creating the credential (more information on how to do that here), here is how our system merges the information you provide with the attributes:
- From the spreadsheet, the system will take the student's name and their grade and populate the [recipient.name] and [credential.grade] attributes respectively.
- The system will then take the display name on the group you are using to publish credentials through and populate the attribute [group.course_name]
- Lastly, because there is no data on the spreadsheet for issue date or credential ID, the system will generate these automatically. The credential ID attribute will be populated with Accredible's own credential ID, and the issue date will default to the date the credential was created.
You will eventually end up with a certificate that looks like this:
And this is how you can create hundreds of individually different, professional-looking certificates.
Attributes in Email Templates
Attributes can also be found in email templates in order to personalize each email you send. Edit the body of the email template to include any attributes you would like. By default, the Course Name and Issuer Name are included, but you could add in the recipient name or even a custom image attribute.
Has this article helped you? Let us know!
If you would like to tell us about any improvements you feel could be made to this page, you can email us at support@accredible.com.