Getting Started¶

Techsign API Philosophy¶

An API is an application programming interface - in short, it’s a set of rules that lets programs talk to each other, exposing data and functionality across the internet in a consistent format. REST stands for Representational State Transfer. This is an architectural pattern that describes how distributed systems can expose a consistent interface. When people use the term ‘REST API’, they are generally referring to an API accessed via HTTP protocol at a predefined set of URLs.

These URLs represent various resources - any information or content accessed at that location, which can be returned as JSON, HTML, audio files, or images. Often, resources have one or more methods that can be performed on them over HTTP, like GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

Techsign DOC, for example, provides many separate REST APIs for signing documents, creating & updating contracts, managing document files, and extracting necessary document information. In DOC’s ecosystem, each feature is its own API, but you will work with each of them in roughly the same way, whether over HTTP or using several different programming languages.

For each API Url provided, definition, purpose, input and output models are explained in detail in the documentation section. Thus, an API call can be created using your favorite language. In addition, our Swagger interface allows testing, exploring and client code creation for major languages.

Basics¶

You can use the Techsign DOC API in test mode, which does not affect your live data or documents. Simply create a test user on Techsign DOC Test to start experimenting with our API.

Getting and Using The API Key¶

After an API subscription starts, an API key is delivered to the admin e-mail. If necessary, this key can be changed in the settings section after signing in to the site. In order to make a successful API call, this key should be provided in the header section of the call, as follows:

--header 'Authorization: Bearer FSvLtBg3Jw/qYH+29eT+y5WZoB9BNFZUdig6wRmtlYY='

This usage is based on OAuth2 and can be implemented as OAuth2 client credentials.