Benefits Intake API Metadata Validator
Last Updated:
Lighthouse offers a suite of APIs to access VA data. One of these APIs is the Benefits Intake API. The Benefits Intake API allows us to upload benefits claims documents to Central Mail. In the process of uploading a benefits claims document, clients must both upload the document itself and a JSON object of metadata. This guide is intended to give background on the MetadataValidator, a tool that will make your form submission fail early if it will run afoul of Lighthouse’s validations.
This document will review the fields that the Benefits Intake API requires in its metadata and illustrate how you can run your metadata through the MetadataValidator before every form submission.
The required metadata fields
Per the documentation on Lighthouse (screenshot below is an expanded snippet from the Schemas section), there are 6 required fields in the metadata.
Expanded snippet from DocumentUploadMetadata in the Schemas section
The MetadataValidator uses the regular expressions found in the above documentation to either correct metadata (for example, by changing invalid zip codes to 00000) or reject form submissions whose metadata cannot be corrected.
Using the MetadataValidator
An example of its use can be found here, where we run our own metadata through the MetadataValidator as a final step before uploading it along with the uploaded document itself.
Help and feedback
Get help from the Platform Support Team in Slack.
Submit a feature idea to the Platform.