Adobe Sign Fill Form fields before creating an Agreement form templates(library documents)?

[pushkaran31816560nz45]

Is there any way to fill a template or library document with its form fields before sending it to customers to sign as agreements? If not, what APIs to use for managing templates, filling those templates and create agreements for those filled templates?

[J_McNeece]

Hi @pushkaran31816560nz45 ,

When you refer to filling templates I assume you are talk about merging form field data into an agreement template before sending so the agreement has specific data prefilled before it is sent. Please correct me if I miss understood your question.

Merging form field data before send can be done multiple ways.

1. You could merge form fileds before send using a custom workflow in Adobe Sign. This requires some manual intervention as the sender must type in the data during the authoring of the agreement. Refer to the following link Set up signing workflows (adobe.com) and look at the documentation around 'Sender Input Fields'
2. You could use custom development and Sign Rest APIs to merge form field data also. In the body of the JSON payload you send, in the POST Agreement API call, you will pass the form field names and the data that will be merged before sending. You can review document specific to this here: How to send an agreement with merge fields using API | Adobe Sign as well as demoing these calls using Adobe's API swagger page here: REST API — Document e-signature Software — Acrobat Sign (echosign.com)
3.  Lastly if you are sending this tempalte out to several different recipients (not participants) then you can use Adobe Sign's bulk send functionality... Mega Sign. This allows you to merge field data using a .csv file before sending. The following tutorial goes over sending in bulk Send a document in bulk with Send in Bulk (adobe.com). All that is needed is to update the headers of the .csv file with the names of the form fields in the template. 

If you were not refering to merging form field data but instead were looking for information around creating a template with form fields this can be done in Adobe Sign by selecting create template see here:Create and manage document templates (adobe.com), you can also create form fields using Adobe text tagging see here: Adobe Acrobat Sign Text Tag Guide, or can create documents using the transient document API see here along with Adobe Acrobat Sign Text Tagging: How to Send an Agreement through REST- API (Tranisent document ) | Adobe Sign 

[pushkaran31816560nz45]

Thank you for replying @J_McNeece.

I am looking for filling templates and creating agreements, as you have mentioned in your 2nd point using SIGN REST APIs. My requirement right now is to create a agreement with filled values of the template. At a later time I need to send this agreement to user so that they can sign it. To implement this, I created an agreement with "AUTHORING" state ( so that the agreement is not out for signing yet) and tried filling it using the solution you have mentioned. But it seems agreement cannot be filled in AUTHORING or DRAFT state. It can only be filled in IN_PROCESS state. But when using IN_PROCESS state, the agreement gets sent to user for signing. I don't want that. I want to create a filled template agreement and keep it. When the time comes I'll update it so that it gets sent to the required customer. How to achieve this?

[J_McNeece]

Hi @pushkaran31816560nz45,

You can use includeMergeFieldData query parameter in authoring/draft status for the following API endpoints
/combinedDocument and /combinedDocument/url. What this will do is make the merged fields visible to your application before you set it to in-process in the POST agreement API.