Migrating to electronic signatures

This guide covers migrating to the Electronic Signatures component from the older signatures functionality that’s included with the Annotations component with licenses obtained in April 2021 or earlier. The older signatures user interface allows users to sign documents by drawing. Electronic Signatures includes a much-improved user interface that allows users to sign documents by drawing, selecting an image, or typing.

Electronic Signatures is a new component, so ensure your license includes Electronic Signatures. Please contact our Sales team if they haven’t already reached out to you.

If you don’t make API customizations and instead use Nutrient’s default signing experience, then there’s no migration needed, and Nutrient will automatically use the newer Electronic Signatures UI.

Signatures stored with the older functionality are fully compatible with Electronic Signatures.

Previously, a series of APIs were specific to handling ink signatures. With the introduction of Electronic Signatures, however, we expanded them so that they also support handling image signatures.

• The PSPDFKit.Configuration#populateInkSignatures option has been renamed to PSPDFKit.Configuration#populateStoredSignatures and now supports specifying image annotations.

• The PSPDFKit.Instance#getInkSignatures method has been renamed to PSPDFKit.Instance#getStoredSignatures and can also return PSPDFKit.Annotations.ImageAnnotation records.

• The PSPDFKit.Instance#setInkSignatures method has been renamed to PSPDFKit.Instance#setStoredSignatures and now supports specifying image annotations.

• The PSPDFKit.InteractionMode.INK_SIGNATURE value has been renamed to PSPDFKit.InteractionMode.SIGNATURE.

• The inkSignatures.create, inkSignatures.update, inkSignatures.delete, and inkSignatures.change events have been renamed to storedSignatures.create, storedSignatures.update, storedSignatures.delete, and storedSignatures.change.

• The ink-signature toolbar item, which was part of PSPDFKit.defaultToolbarItems, has been renamed to signature.

The picker for selecting existing signatures has been expanded with support for also previewing and choosing image signatures from it. Furthermore, users who trigger the existing signatures UI by activating the signature toolbar button won’t have their workflows affected by the new Electronic Signatures functionality, since the new UI is activated in the same manner.

With the introduction of Electronic Signatures, Nutrient Web SDK no longer automatically implements any kind of in-session storage of signatures added through the UI. To offer full flexibility and ease of persisting signatures across sessions, controls for choosing signatures to store are only available if a listener exists for the storedSignatures.create event.