Archive for category: fmESignature Link (DocuSign Edition)

We recently released a free update to fmESignature Link (DocuSign Edition), our FileMaker solution for integrating with the DocuSign eSignature platform, that included support for AutoPlace. AutoPlace (also referred to as anchor tagging) is an advanced field action in DocuSign that adds fields near each occurrence of a given string in a template or document.

With a typical document you would need to specify where you wanted the DocuSign tabs (fields) to appear on the document, for example to capture a signature, initials, name or date. In the fmESignature Link file the setup for adding Template Tabs looks like this:

It can be somewhat fiddly while you work out the coordinates from the left and top of the page for each tab and can involve a bit of trial and error before you get the positioning right. This also means that your tabs are hardcoded into fixed positions on a specific page, which is fine for fixed length documents where these positions will never change.

If you’re working with a variable length document, such as the legal agreement where the length of the agreement could change depending on the number of included clauses, then you won’t be able to know in advance what page and what position to place the these tabs. Fortunately DocuSign has a solution to this problem called AutoPlace, which involves the use of hidden strings that won’t appear anywhere else in your document. The tab/field is then automatically placed in the position of your hidden text string.

This makes setting up Template Tabs in the fmESignature Link file much simpler: instead of working out the pixel positions from the left and top of your page you simply enter the matching string to look for like this:

If your agreement PDF is being generated from a FileMaker layout you simply place the corresponding string on the layout like this (I’ve changed the text colour to red to make it visible, but you would set this to the same colour as the background of your agreement which is typically white)

DocuSign then automatically place the specified tab at the position of the matching string, regardless of which page or where it appears on the final document. With AutoPlace you can have your templates setup for eSignature with DocuSign within minutes using the fmESignature Link (DocuSign Edition) solution.

We’ve added a support article that has all the details of using AutoPlace with fmESignature Link, along with a short video demonstrating the setup of this which you can watch below or on YouTube here.

We’ve just released another free update to fmESignature Link (DocuSign Edition), our FileMaker solution for integrating with the DocuSign eSignature platform. This updates provides additional functionality around DocuSign Templates including:

• you can now specify a value or a field name to use to pre-populate Template Tabs such as Text and Number tabs that can have the value set dynamically
• you can now download the Tabs and Roles for DocuSign Templates to save you having to enter these manually (we downloaded a Template with 6 Roles and 120 tabs in under 2 seconds)
• we’ve updated to support the latest version of the eSignature API (v2.1) and are now using a custom function to store the value of the DocuSign API to allow this to be updated more easily in the future

The new Template Tabs Value field allows you to specify a hardcoded value (e.g. “Acme Inc” for a text tab that users would enter their Company Name into) or a merge field, e.g.:

RequestsContactsContacts::Position

that will be merged at runtime as the Envelope is being constructed and replaced with the value from that field reference for the current recipient record. We’v also added a Locked field to the Template Tabs table to allow certain fields to be locked or “read-only” to the recipient. You can see the difference in the following screenshots. In the first screenshot we have set the Locked Value to false – the field has the pre-populated value but we can edit this if required:

In the next screenshot we have set the set the Locked Value to true and the field has the blue border and cannot be edited:

Here’s a short video showing the downloading of Template Tabs and Roles and how to use the new Template Tabs Value field to pre-populate custom tabs (you can also watch it on YouTube here):

The full list of changes are listed in the version history here. Existing customers can download this version from the link on your original order email (contact us if you need the link to be reset etc).