Adobe Sign - Apply Signature from Appian Button

No.  As far as I've seen the best you can do is embed the Adobe Signing URL in an Appian interface and make the signing user sign it from there.  They will then need to be coached that they also must submit the Appian task (unless you can find a way in Appian to design around that, though I haven't yet).

That pretty much nails our issue. We are trying to find a way to reduce the number of "clicks" it takes to sign documents and it doesn't look like there's anything that can be done on the Adobe Sign side. We are toying with the idea of utilizing RPA to trigger based on the "Approval Button" and then apply an e-signature on the PDF. We probably will see some latency but possible a better user experience.

I don't have experience with Adobe signatures, but isn't there an option to sign the documents via API calls? I mean, do you NEED that UI interaction? Trying to make two UIs to collaborate where none is made for this, will always be a pain.

Unknown said:

but isn't there an option to sign the documents via API calls?

You can populate the template with arbitrary data via API call (which is nice and flexible) but actual signatures (as far as I've seen) require actual user interaction; there's "draw signature" functionality in place and all that, all backed by an Adobe-internal UI, which would be hard to side-step.

I've done Docusign and AFAIK, it is not possible to do it via API.

Closest you can get is embedding the web UI from the provider, clicking sign button and waiting for the webhook to come back and completing the task in the background.

OK. Then an interaction could look like.

1 Appian UI with embedded Adobe UI

2 User clicks "SIGN" in the Adobe UI

3 Adobe calls Appian in the background

4 User clicks a kind of "Refresh" button in the Appian UI

5 Appian UI checks for the received callback and shows a "Continue" button

There might be better options, but trying to make two nested UIs interact nicely is not supported by Appian outside of component plugins.

OK. Then an interaction could look like.

1 Appian UI with embedded Adobe UI

2 User clicks "SIGN" in the Adobe UI

3 Adobe calls Appian in the background

4 User clicks a kind of "Refresh" button in the Appian UI

5 Appian UI checks for the received callback and shows a "Continue" button

There might be better options, but trying to make two nested UIs interact nicely is not supported by Appian outside of component plugins.

Unknown said:

User clicks a kind of "Refresh" button in the Appian UI

I created a shared sub-interface that provides the user a button called "Validate Signature" - in the background, this passes in the Adobe Sign "Agreement ID" (the primary key text string identifying the unique instance of the signed document in question) and the email address of the current "signer", and validates whether the person has successfully signed within the embedded interface (which could technically happen externally too, for all Adobe cares) - when the signature condition has been satisfied, on-form variables switch around to show the user a regular "submit" button - though for our case, we had to make it the largest size, in an obnoxious color, and labelled something bludgeoningly obvious like "CLICK HERE TO SEND FOR PROCESSING --->", because we were finding too often that users would merely sign within the Adobe pane, then click out of the task without doing anything extra to submit the process along.

That is exactly the issue with this kind of "integration" ...

Mike Schmitt said:

then click out of the task without doing anything extra to submit the process along

It's frustrating but it's vital to our business process - and fortunately the percentage of such failure is rather low (we process hundreds at a time, and only have to chase down a few stragglers).  It's frustrating that there isn't something more concrete to do about it, but I place most of that blame on Adobe and their frustratingly inflexible framework.