Iframe or Embedded Signing
Embed/iframe the signing page in your own app.
The Legalesign Signer web component is now available and is the recommended way to embed signing in your application. It provides a seamless, framework-agnostic signing experience without iframes. See Signer component.
Direct links
If you need a simple open page that requires no customisation, where anyone can go and sign a document (and optionally confirm their email afterwards), try Legalesign Link. You can make these in the web app without code. They are embeddable too. Examples of Links might be event registration, timesheets, liability waivers. Learn more about Legalesign Link (embeddable signing pages).
API
If you need to customise the document, or require more functionality, then use the API.
Constraints
Devices
This relates to PDF based documents (not text/html based documents).
- desktop contexts work well
- mobile contexts work for simple documents (i.e. a signature, not complex forms)
- mobile contexts where you have a complex form may not work well (especially for iphones) and we recommend you jump the user to a new browser window (you can hide this by removing signing page cruft and a redirect, see below).
While the last option is not seamless UX, it will ensure a reliable experience for your users. As far as we know, it is not possible to be confident about the size of the user's device from within an iframe window (in some or all iphones), which makes clean navigation around a complex form unreliable.
Signature standard
A second warning, without some planning you may not meet the 'advanced' electronic signature standard.
Key tenets of the standard include
- your signatory must be in sole control of the signing process and
- they must be uniquely identifiable.
By receiving the signing link yourself you can now sign the document; sole control is lost.
A solution might be to add SMS validation for your recipient. Receipt of that sms text will be under your recipient's sole control and will uniquely identify them.
You will need to plan what controls are in place to ensure the signatory is identifiable and in sole control on your side to regain that 'advanced' standard. Learn more about the law on electronic signatures.
How to embed signing
For new integrations, use the Signer component — it handles signing and completion events without iframes or manual link management.
Next.
After a signing you can download the final PDF document. We recommend using webhooks to do that. Learn more about webhooks. Check out the documentation for the API call to download a final PDF. Avoid pulling the download immediately after a signing event, the final PDF may not be ready. More reliably, listen for the webhook where the object is 'document' and the event is 'finalPdfCreated'.