Files

A file in BNDRY is the raw uploaded content — a PDF, an image, a scanned form — stored against a parent record. Files live in the data-collection layer and are always attached to something: an entity, a workspace, or a form. The file itself is just bytes and a display name; the meaning of those bytes comes from the record it's attached to.

Why files exist

Compliance work generates artefacts. A reviewer takes a photo of a passport, a customer uploads a utility bill, a partner sends a signed agreement as a PDF. The platform needs somewhere to put those bytes so that they remain associated with the customer record, survive review and audit, and can be retrieved later without hunting through email or shared drives.

BNDRY treats a file as a deliberately thin concept. It holds the raw content and remembers where it came from, and that's all. Structured interpretation of what's in the file — the passport number, the form responses, the screening result — lives elsewhere, in records like documents or form submissions. Keeping the bytes separate from the structured interpretation means a single uploaded scan can support multiple structured records, and that re-interpreting an old file later doesn't require re-uploading it.

Key properties

A file is small by design. It has:

• Display name — the human-readable label that appears in the UI, set by the uploader (for example, John Doe – driver licence).
• Content — the raw bytes of the upload, up to 10 MiB.
• Source — an output-only reference back to the parent that the file was attached to, such as an entity, a workspace, or a form. This is set by the platform when the file is created and is not something the uploader chooses directly.
• Timestamps — when the file was created and most recently updated.

Files can be created directly, or via context-specific endpoints — for example, attaching a file to an entity during onboarding, or to a form submission as the customer fills it in. Once created, a file can be retrieved with or without its content: the basic view returns just the metadata, which is useful when listing files in a UI; the full view returns the bytes when the file actually needs to be displayed or downloaded.

How files relate

A file is the raw-bytes counterpart to a structured document. Where a document holds the fields read off a passport, a file holds the scan of that passport — together they describe both what the identity document said and what it physically looked like. Files also attach directly to entities as supporting evidence, to workspaces as workspace-level artefacts, and to forms as customer-supplied uploads. Notes recorded against the same parent record carry the operator commentary that the file's bytes don't speak for themselves.