Motivated by a need to honor discounted rates for current members, we needed to update the way we allow lenders to specify a borrower’s credit union member id. Previously, the only way they could do this was to choose from a list of radio options on the loan contracting page at the end of the loan process. The new functionality would let the lender specify that id instead on the edit application page at the start of that process.
We had to abide by complicated rules defining when the member id edit field should even display on the application page. This was dependent mainly on whether a social security number or member id lookup had just been performed. We typically validate on the front-end dynamically using the jQuery validate library. After initial development, we determined this should be disabled for the member id field to limit the number of requests we send to Symitar.
Instead, this field is validated on save, where we send an ajax request through our back-end service so the Symitar API which determines if a member id matches any SSN associated with the loan. Some of this work was aggravated by the shear number of methods we allow lenders to update borrower data in general, plus a non-intuitive application page architecture that had to be learned and… overcome. Yes, “overcome” is probably a good word to describe that.