Technical use cases

In your application you will be signing different documents from many sources. How can your application process such documents in order for them to be recognized by the Box Sign service?

A signature request can have multiple requirements, or inputs, beyond the traditional signature, such as name, date, and initials. These inputs are called signature properties. The Box Sign service needs to know where to place these inputs in the document, and how to recognize them.

The first step is to consider if the document has the necessary information for the Box Sign service to recognize the signature properties.

If not, then the document is unstructured, and should be prepared before sending the signature request. This is called document preparation, and is an extra step automatically created by the Box Sign service.

There are two other types of documents that already have the necessary information for the Box Sign service to recognize the signature properties. The sign templates, managed in the Box application, and the structured documents, which are dynamically generated documents, containing specific tags representing the signature properties.