The TRACE Service is an expanded form of the Formatting Service. Its purpose is to record the processes performed on a name or address as it passes through the Formatting Service.

Examples of applications which use TRACE are:

Most uses of the TRACE Service will rely on a good Edit-list. For example, to determine a person’s Salutation when one did not previously exist requires an Edit-list with a well defined First Name Gender section.

The result of a Call to TRACE is an enhanced Words-stack containing the Edit-list categories and other information for each word, initial and code in the name or address.

The application which calls TRACE will analyze and process the enhanced Words-stack and make decisions based on the attributes it discovers.