Overview
Container vs Site management describes Yodlee's approach to consolidating and viewing multiple user accounts. Consumers can leverage the new feature that enables a consumer with single sign-on to access multiple accounts on a site.
Container Managed Approach
Consumers add accounts using Yodlee FinancialData(FinDat). At Yodlee, checking, savings, home loans, and car loans are called item accounts and the containers (account type) to which these accounts belong are called items. Savings and checking accounts are mapped to a banking container. Similarly, there are separate containers for each of the mentioned accounts in the Yodlee database. The YI APIs are based on item management APIs, which in turn are based on the content service ID.
Each item account is validated with a set of user credentials.
When a consumer creates items and item accounts, the details of the items are refreshed by the cache server at regular intervals. When the consumer logs in to Yodlee FinDat and views the details of accounts, the FinDat application retrieves the refreshed details and displays them for the consumer.
Refer to REST APIs for implementing container managed approach. Refer to Data Organization for details.
Limitation to Container-based APIs
A consumer can input selection criteria for the API to fetch item summaries that match the specified criteria; however, pulling transactions from the ItemSummary call is not possible. Since Yodlee stores an indefinite number of transactions, and this method does not limit the number of returns coming back, the number of returns will grow indefinitely.
YI services offers SOAP-based container-managed APIs via LAW (Link Account Wizard).
Site Managed Approach
The site management APIs replace the earlier version of the APIs (ItemManagement APIs) that were based on the content service ID.
At Yodlee if the same consumer credentials are required to access different types of accounts available at the site then there will be only one site account and the separate accounts present at the site will be called item accounts.
Let us assume ABC bank has two sites: www.ABCbanking.com for banking accounts and www.ABCinvestment.com for investment accounts. Set of credentials required to access both these sites are different. A consumer with banking account and investment account adds the ABC banking and ABC investment sites to the application. In this case, Yodlee will create two site accounts – one for banking and one for investments – and three item accounts are created for each set of user credentials.
The site is validated with one set of user credentials and Yodlee adds all the item accounts associated with that site automatically.
These actions can be performed using the site management APIs. Once a site is added to the application, the consumer can view all the accounts, transactions, and information that is related to the item account.
YI services offers completely REST-based site-managed APIs via FastLink
Get a peek at our Site-based APIs for implementing site managed approach. Refer Data Organization for details.