airSlate’s Document Automation Hub API allows developers to build, using code, a wide variety of functionalities for processing and sharing documents. If you have a workflow that involves a document and you want to use an API, consider using the Document Automation Hub API.

Using the Document Automation Hub API, you can build workflows that send forms in a variety of ways. This tutorial and this tutorial illustrate how you can embed a form on a mobile-friendly webpage, and also how you can send a form by email.

These tutorials explore multiple use cases of sending forms — a patient onboarding application and a park facility booking application. Hospitals and clinics are some of the most common real-world users of airSlate, and recreational facilities also use airSlate.

An even larger number of airSlate’s users are in the insurance industry, the focus of the tutorial in this article. In the workflow we will describe, users receive an SMS text message that they can fill out a form to obtain a life insurance quote. Sending forms by SMS text is another feature airSlate supports.

Sending forms by SMS messages

The workflow this article will illustrate is for sending SMS text messages to prospective customers of a life insurance company. It is as follows:

1. The prospective customer is sent a promotional SMS text message, with a link to a form they can fill out to receive a life insurance quote.
2. The prospective customer fills out the form.
3. If the form is submitted with all required fields complete, the prospective customer receives a thank-you SMS text message with a link to the completed form.

You will need a device set up to receive SMS text messages, as well as a registered Document Automation Hub account. You will also need to have Python installed — this tutorial, in one section, uses Python 3 to run data parsing commands.

Authenticating with the API

It’s time to set up the API so you can make your first Document Automation Hub API requests. Go to the dashboard of your Document Automation Hub account and create a new application with the “Add Application” button on the top left, as shown below:

The application name is unimportant as long as you remember it. It should also be unique. Here, I’m naming it “Document Automation Hub Demo.” The application URL is even less important for this application, and I’m pointing it to the airSlate domain.

Once the application is created, click on its name where it appears on the Document Automation Hub account dashboard. You will get to a page that, going forward, this tutorial will call the application page. It shows the client ID; client secret; application URL; and “Code Grant,” “JWT Grant,” “Implicit Grant,” and “Password Grant” tabs.

The next step is to get an access token for an Implicit Grant, a special string enabling access to the API. An Implicit Grant is a type of authorization grant in which the access token is obtained directly, via a URL string. It is different from some other types of authorization grants, in which the authorization code obtained through the URL string would be exchanged for an access token as an extra verification step.

An Implicit Grant is chosen because the application handles individual users, with the information only moderately confidential. The form the prospective customer fills out is intended to be quick and user-friendly rather than comprehensive, personal, and precise.

The prospective customer enters information such as name, basic contact information, the type of life insurance plan they may be interested in, and a bit of self-reported physical and health information. The health information is a free-text description intended to be approximate rather than exact, that is not stored in an individual’s record.

To get an Implicit Grant access token, click on the “Implicit Grant” tab on the application page. At that tab, copy the “Link to get the access token” and enter it into the browser. Log into your account at the “Link to get the access token” URL and, once logged in, obtain the access token from the URL string. The access token is the entire part of the URL string between access_token= and &auth_outcome=logged-in. To test whether you have obtained a working access token, enter the access token into the “Token” field of “Auth” on this page. Specify that the API request is going to the “Main (production) server,” and click “Send API Request.” You should receive a “200 OK” response.

As we have just demonstrated, the Document Automation Hub API’s documentation has the unusual, highly convenient feature of enabling API requests to be made directly on the documentation pages. This can help developers use the API to set up workflows more efficiently.

Now that you have access to the API, it’s time to use the API to build the document automation capabilities.

Creating the Insurance Company’s Workspace

First, you will create the insurance company’s workspace as an organization that can store and run its own document workflow automation processes. Go to this “Create a new Organization” page, enter your access token in the “Token” field of “Auth,” specify that the API request is going to the production server, and enter the following in “Body”:

{
“name”: “Rabee Life Insurance”,
“subdomain”: “rabee-life-insurance”,
“category”: “INSURANCE”,
“size”: “0–5”
}

Once you finish forming your request, click “Send API Request.” If the response successfully creates the organization, save the organization ID, which you will use in future requests.

If the subdomain is taken, you will receive a 422 “Unprocessable Entity” error as a response and will need to enter another subdomain. Although the application built in this tutorial uses the subdomain “rabee-life-insurance,” it should not be a big deal to use another.

The Document Automation Hub API Guide’s pages for specific requests also include the code for making each request in various programming languages — cURL, HTTPie, WGet, Python3, the Requests library of Python, JavaScript, Node, Go, C, Objective-C, OCaml, C#, Java, HTTP/1.1, Clojure, Kotlin, PHP, Powershell, R, Ruby, and Swift. So, you can embed API calls into almost any existing piece of code.

And now, if you go via browser to the subdomain you indicated in your request — for this tutorial, https://rabee-life-insurance.airslate.com/ — you will see an actual, empty workspace. Time to add some document automation.

Organizations, Templates, and Workflows

The workspace is described as the Organization in the API documentation. You can make many types of Document Automation Hub API requests to build automated document workflows within it. These automated processes are handled and run using special structures we can create within the Organization, called Templates and Workflows.

A Template is a group of fillable documents and forms that can be sent to recipients for completion. Templates require all their forms to be included when they are sent to a recipient. For this application, we are sending out one form for prospective customers to request a life insurance quote. As a result, we will only need one Template.

A Workflow, which used to be called a Flow, is a single run of the standard back-and-forth process for a Template’s documents and forms. For example, each time a person is hired, they might receive a different copy of the standard employment contract. A new Workflow might be created for each new hire, to send the contract to the new employee and their manager for signature.

We will create a single Workflow in our Template each time we send out the life insurance quote request form.

Creating the Template and uploading the Form

The next step is to create the Template for holding the life insurance quote request form. Go to “Create a new Template” in the documentation. Fill in your access token in “Token” and your organization ID in “organization_id.” Send the API request to the production server with the following body:

{
“name”: “Life Insurance Quote Request”
}

Upon receiving a successful response to your API request, make sure you save the template ID for future API calls. Or, you can get a list of Templates in your Organization here. With the Template created, we can now add the form to it.

The form comes from the Document Automation Hub API form library, which includes over 400 sample forms for a wide variety of purposes. You can get this full list of forms by making a request to “Get a list of form templates” here, filling in your access token and organization ID, and indicating that the response should return 500 results per page.

In case you were confused, the “Form templates” are not the same structure as the “Life Insurance Quote Request” Template we have just created. Going forward, we will call the “Form templates” forms when referring to their functionality and documents when referring to their structure.

We will use a Python script, either on the Python Shell or in a file, to make the API request to obtain the ID of the form you want to upload — the “Responsive Life-insurance Quote Form.” This script is based on the code available in the API documentation to make a “Get a list of form templates” request in Python 3.

Here is the full Python script. Write your access token instead of <your access token> in variable ACCESS_TOKEN, and your Organization ID instead of <your organization ID> in variable ORGANIZATION_ID.

import http.client
import json

ACCESS_TOKEN = "<your access token>"
ORGANIZATION_ID = "<your organization ID>"

conn = http.client.HTTPSConnection("api.airslate.io")

headers = {
   'Accept': "application/json",
   'Authorization': "Bearer " + ACCESS_TOKEN
}

conn.request("GET", "/v1/organizations/{}/forms/templates?per_page=500".format(ORGANIZATION_ID), headers=headers)

res = conn.getresponse()
data = res.read()

json_string = data.decode("utf-8")
f = json.loads(json_string)
forms = f['data']

for form in forms:
   if (form['title'] == "Responsive Life-insurance Quote Form"):
       print(form['id'])
       break

The script prints out the ID of the “Responsive Life-insurance Quote Form.” Be sure to save this form ID for future API calls. You will use it for your next API call, uploading the form to the template.

To make this call, go to “Create a web form” in the documentation. Fill in your access token, the Organization ID, and the Template ID. Put the following request in “Body”:

{
“name”: “Responsive Life-insurance Quote Form”,
“form_template_id”: “<form ID>”
}

where <form ID> is the ID of the “Responsive Life-insurance Quote Form” you obtained in the previous script. Send the API request to the production server. Now the form should be uploaded to the Template.

Setting up the Form

Go to the Organization subdomain for your organization — for the organization created in this tutorial, http://rabee-life-insurance.airslate.com. You should now see, in the left menu bar under “Recents,” a “Life Insurance Quote Request.”

Click on this “Life Insurance Quote Request” in the left menu bar. Then click “Configure” at the top right of your screen. You should see, in the bottom left, that the “Responsive Life-insurance Quote Form” has been uploaded.

The screen should show an editable Workflow setup, where you can add and remove steps in processing the form. It should look something like this.

On this screen, you will hook up the Workflow so it actually sends text messages to recipients.

Making form fields required

At the bottom left of the screen, click on the three dots at the right of the “Responsive Life-Insurance Quote Form.” A menu will pop up, where you can select “Open document.” You will see the form, editable in the browser. Click on “Assign Fields” to Recipient 1 to close the popup.

Click on the field “Full Name.” A “Properties” menu will appear on the right. Select from that menu that the “Full Name” field is “Required.” You should now see a red star to the right of “Full Name,” above the text field.

Repeat by clicking on the following fields and selecting “Required,” to make the following fields required: “Street Address” (leave “Street Address Line 2” as optional), “City,” “State/Province,” “Zip Code,” “Country,” “Phone Number,” “E-mail,” “Birth Date,” “Which Life Plan?,” “How much life insurance do you want us to quote?,” “Height,” and “Weight.”

Leave “Street Address Line 2” and “Describe any health issues?” as optional. Click “Continue” at the bottom of the screen. The changes you have made to the form will be saved, and you will return to the editable Workflow setup.

Enabling Forms to be sent

We are setting the form to get sent automatically. To do so, click “Add autostart” near the top of the screen. Click again on “Add autostart” on the popup that appears on the right, and select that you would like a “Scheduled start.”

Set the time you want to receive the form. Here, I set it to 9:30 PM US Eastern time. Then, I selected that I wanted to repeat having it sent “Multiple times,” sending it every 24 hours and stopping sending after 7 occurrences. I also selected “Notify Admin every time a document is sent.” Click on “Apply changes” and then on “Apply.”

Next, you will indicate that the form should be sent to your number. On the step that says “Recipient 1,” select that you want to send the form by SMS by selecting “Phone,” and enter your number. Be sure the country flag shows the correct country.

Then click the gear on the top right of the step with “Recipient 1,” and a menu will pop up on the right of the screen. Click “Recipient” on that menu. Enter the following “Happy Spring” message in “Customize Message,” before the link to your document. Then click “Apply.”

Happy Spring! Spring into Spring with Rabee Life Insurance. Fill out this form for a quote:

Next, click on the “+” below the step with “Recipient 1” and above “Completed.” Select that you want to add a new “Step.” You will see another step for “Recipient 2” appear. As you did for the step with “Recipient 1,” select that you want to send the form by SMS by selecting “Phone,” and enter your number. Note that “Recipient 2” is the same as “Recipient 1.”

Click on the gear on the step with “Recipient 2.” Click “Recipient” and enter the following “Thank you” message in “Customize message,” before the link to your document:

Thank you for requesting a quote from Rabee Life Insurance! A representative will get back to you. For your records:

Click on “Conditions” on the right-side menu, which is below “Recipient.” You will see that the step occurs “When document data” “Revision status” “is completed.” Click “OR.”

For the new condition that appears, select that the step occurs when, for “Responsive Life-insurance Quote Form,” “All required fields” “is not empty.” In other words, the filled-out form is sent back to you with a thank you message once you have submitted it with all the required information.

Finally, click “Apply.” Congratulations, you have set up the workflow!

At the bottom of the editable Workflow setup, you can click on “Test” to send the form as a test to your email address, and “Publish” to finalize the Workflow.

Running the Workflow

In addition to the scheduled sending of the form, you can also run the workflow immediately upon request. When you click on “Responsive Life-insurance Quote Request” on the main page of your Organization, you will see a “Run Workflow” button. Click on it.

If you entered your phone number correctly, you should receive an SMS text message with the “Happy Spring” message you wrote, and a link to fill out the form. Upon filling out and submitting the form, you should receive an SMS text message with the “Thank You” message you wrote.

If you’ve gotten to the end of this tutorial and built out this application, congratulations! Enjoy this tulip garden and check out some other features in airSlate’s Document Automation Hub API.

The post SMS API: Send forms over SMS text with airSlate’s Document Automation Hub API appeared first on airSlate Blog | Business automation.

airSlate is regularly recognized as a provider of some of the best document automation software. Its form automation services are used by numerous companies and organizations, who can testify to their effectiveness. The UK-based swimming school In at the Deep End (IATDE), for example, automates its sign-up and birthday party reservation processes with airSlate. Its new sign-up process includes the pre-filling of forms with participant data and the automatic saving of forms. Its new birthday party reservation process automatically keeps track of which time slots are available. IATDE has saved money and time on paperwork, and quickly built a system customers have described as forward-thinking.

Another example is T2 Biosystems, a company specializing in in-vitro diagnostics. airSlate literally helps them saves patient lives with form processing. The ability to save partly completed forms reduces their back-and-forth, speeding up diagnosis and treatment in the hospitals that use T2 Biosystems’ technologies.

Want to create mobile-friendly no-code web forms using airSlate’s drag-and-drop editor? This post is all you need. Our tutorial will show you how to create forms with the Document Automation Hub APIs, and how to use the Document Automation Hub so processing your forms is easy as pie.

For the purpose of the tutorial, let’s create an app for booking a picnic area, to run on your local server.

Booking the Picnic Area

The application to book the picnic area will include forms, PDFs, and eSignatures. To make the booking:

1. The user fills out a web form.
2. After submitting the form, the user signs a waiver sent in an email.
3. A park staff member signs that they have reviewed the full application, and indicates whether the application has been approved.
4. The waiver is stored on the park facility’s server as a PDF.

The application will run on your local machine using Python’s SimpleHTTPServer. To use SimpleHTTPServer, you will need to have Python installed — this tutorial uses Python 3. To use the Document Automation Hub APIs, you will also need a registered Document Automation Hub account.

Setting up the Local Server

In the directory of your choice on your local machine, create a folder called picnic_area containing two files: index.html and thankyou.html.

We’re leaving the file index.html blank for now. Later, we will embed the first form in our document automation process into that page. Submission of that form will redirect you to thankyou.html. Put the following code in thankyou.html. It’s based on Andy Brewer’s MVP template, and you could probably copy and paste it. Here’s the code:

<!-- MVP.css quickstart template: https://github.com/andybrewer/mvp/ -->

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
   <link rel="icon" href="https://via.placeholder.com/1x1">
   <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/mvp.css">

   <meta charset="utf-8">
   <meta name="description" content="Landing page after submitting first part of application to reserve picnic area">
   <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

   <title>Thank you!</title>
</head>

<body>
   <header>
       <h1>Thank you for your interest in booking the Blue Hills Park picnic area!</h1>
       <p>You will be emailed a waiver to sign.</p>
       <p>Upon signing and sending the waiver, you will hear from a park staff member within three business days.</p>
       <p>They will let you know if your application has been approved.</p>
   </header>
   <main>
           <!-- Image source: NewtonCourt, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons -->
           <img alt="blue-hills-park" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Blue_Hills_P1140207.jpg" style="display: block;margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto;width: 80%;" />
   </main>
   <footer>
       <hr />
       <p>
           <small>
               Questions? Contact airSlate at <a href="https://www.airslate.com/contact?utm_medium=article&utm_source=blog&utm_campaign=document_automation_hub_api&utm_content=10_2023-Forms_API_An_Easy_to_Use_API_for_Mobile-Friendly_Web_Forms&utm_term=thankyou_page">this link</a>.
           </small>
       </p>
   </footer>
</body>
</html>

In the main picnic_area directory, run the local server on the command line. My local machine is a Mac, and my command is as follows:

$ python3 -m http.server

Once the server starts, navigate in your browser to http://localhost:8000/thankyou.html, and the page should look like this:

Now you have some nice pages to embed your forms in and redirect the user to on completion, so we will switch to building the actual document automation processes.

Authenticating with the API

It’s time to set up the API so you can make your first Document Automation Hub API requests. Go to the dashboard of your Document Automation Hub account and create a new application with the “Add Application” button on the top left, as shown below:

The application name is unimportant as long as you remember it. It should also be unique. Here, I’m naming it “Document Automation Hub Demo.” The application URL is even less important for this application, and I’m pointing it to the airSlate domain.

Once the application is created, click on its name where it appears on the Document Automation Hub account dashboard. You will get to a page that, going forward, this tutorial will call the application page. It shows the client ID; client secret; application URL; and “Code Grant,” “JWT Grant,” “Implicit Grant,” and “Password Grant” tabs.

The next step is to get an authorization code for a Code Grant. A Code Grant is a type of authorization grant that requires the user to agree for you to access user data. It also includes extra verification steps that the client is who it says it is.

Here, you will be accessing data on the park facility’s private workspace, and sending private, legally binding data such as personally identifiable information and eSignatures. This calls for a more secure type of grant. You can read the full documentation for how to get a Code Grant here or watch this video.

You need to use the authorization code to get the bearer token, valid for two days. The request for the bearer token can be copied from the application page. In the request, you must enter the redirect URI, client ID, client secret, and authorization code. Since the first three are copied automatically, the authorization code is the only part you must copy manually.

When you have successfully obtained the bearer token, copy and save the string called access_token which you receive in your response. The access token will enable you to authenticate your Document Automation Hub API requests.

Bug Note: When you copy the URL “Link to get the authorization code” from the application page and enter that URL in the browser, you will be asked to enter a username and password. At that point, you may sign in with another service, such as Google or Apple, to get the authorization code rather than manually entering your username and password. If you do so, then when you use the authorization code to try and get the bearer token, you may get this error — even if you do correctly decrypt the authorization code:

{“error”:”invalid_request”,”error_description”:”The request is missing a required parameter, includes an invalid parameter value, includes a parameter more than once, or is otherwise malformed.”,”hint”:”Cannot decrypt the authorization code”,”message”:”
The request is missing a required parameter, includes an invalid parameter value, includes a parameter more than once, or is otherwise malformed.”}

This error is a known bug. You can avoid it by entering the username and password manually. If you cannot, you should contact airSlate Customer Support, describing the issue, to get proper access.

Creating the Park Facility’s Workspace

Now that you can authenticate, it’s time to build the document automation capabilities using the Document Automation Hub API. First, you will create the park facility’s workspace as an organization that can store and run its own document workflow automation processes.

For one-off requests, the most convenient way to use the Document Automation Hub API is by running it on the production server, on the page of the documentation itself. To create the park facility, go to this “Create a new Organization” page, enter your access_token in the “Token” field of “Auth,” specify that the API request is going to the production server, and enter the following in “Body”:

{
 "name": "Blue Hills Park",
 "subdomain": "blue-hills-park",
 "category": "LEISURE_AND_HOSPITALITY",
 "size": "6-50"
}

On the API documentation page, the request will look like this:

Once you finish forming your request, click “Send API Request.” If the response successfully creates the organization, save the organization ID, which you will use in future requests.

If the subdomain is taken, you will receive a 422 “Unprocessable Entity” error as a response and will need to enter another subdomain. Although the application built in this tutorial uses the subdomain “blue-hills-park,” it should not be a big deal to use another.

The Document Automation Hub API Guide’s pages for specific requests also include the code for making each request in various programming languages — cURL, HTTPie, WGet, Python3, the Requests library of Python, JavaScript, Node, Go, C, Objective-C, OCaml, C#, Java, HTTP/1.1, Clojure, Kotlin, PHP, Powershell, R, Ruby, and Swift. So, you can embed API calls into almost any existing piece of code.

And now, if you go via browser to the subdomain you indicated in your request — for this tutorial, https://blue-hills-park.airslate.com/ — you will see an actual, empty workspace. Time to add some document automation.

Organizations, Templates, and Flows

The workspace is described as the Organization in the API documentation. To enable the document flow automation, you need to make additional Document Automation Hub API requests to create structures within the workspace, which are called Templates and Flows.

A Template is a group of fillable documents and forms that can be sent to recipients for completion. Since Templates require all their forms to be included when they are sent to a recipient, we will create two Templates, one containing the initial booking form and the other containing the waiver form. The waiver form is only sent after submitting the initial booking form.

A Flow is a single run of the standard back-and-forth process for a Template’s documents and forms. For example, each time a person is hired, they might receive a different copy of the standard employment contract. A new Flow might be created for each new hire to send the contract to the new employee and their manager for signature.

We will create a single Flow in the initial booking Template for all users to fill out the form. We will create a new Flow in the waiver Template for each time the waiver form is sent out.

Creating the Templates

The next step is to create the two Templates for holding the Documents. Go to “Create a new Template” in the documentation. Fill in your access_token in “Token” and your organization ID in “organization_id.” For the initial booking Template, send the API request to the production server with the following body:

{
“name”: “Picnic Area Reservations”,
“description”: “Application for reserving picnic area”,
“redirect_url”: “http://localhost:8000/thankyou.html"
}

Make sure the redirect_url is set to the “thankyou” page of the local server you created, where the user will be redirected when the initial booking form is submitted.

For the waiver Template, send the API request to the production server with the following body:

{
“name”: “Facility Use Waiver”,
“description”: “Signable waiver of liability”,
“redirect_url”: "https://www.mass.gov/locations/blue-hills-reservation"
}

Make sure you save both Template IDs for future API calls. Or, you can get a list of Templates in your Organization here.

The Booking Form

In airSlate, it is possible to either create a form yourself or upload and edit a pre-existing form. Forms and other documents can be built or edited in the drag and drop form designer. Forms can also be built using the API, which we will do for the initial booking form in this tutorial.

The API supports the creation of many different types of form fields. We will use several of these, including single-line text, multi-line text, email, phone number, and date.

Go to “Create a web form” in the documentation. Put your access_token in “Token,” your organization ID in “organization_id,” and your “Picnic Area Reservations” template ID in “template_id.”

Replace the sample code in “Body” with the code below, which you can probably just copy and paste. Then click “Send API Request” to the production server. Upon a successful response, save the ID of the form you have created.

{
“name”: “Booking Form”,
“fields”: [
{
“name”: “Picnic Area Reservation Application”,
“type”: “heading”,
“description”: “Thank you for your interest in the Blue Hills Picnic Area! Please fill out this form to reserve it.”,
“title”: “Picnic Area Reservation Application”,
“page”: “page1”
}, {
“name”: “Full Name”,
“type”: “text”,
“title”: “Full Name”,
“value”: null,
“placeholder”: “”,
“page”: “page1”
}, {
“name”: “Billing Address”,
“type”: “text”,
“title”: “Billing Address”,
“value”: null,
“placeholder”: “”,
“page”: “page1”
}, {
“name”: “City State Zip”,
“type”: “text”,
“title”: “City, State, Zip”,
“value”: null,
“placeholder”: “”,
“page”: “page1”
}, {
“name”: “Email Address”,
“type”: “email”,
“title”: “Email Address”,
“value”: null,
“placeholder”: “”,
“page”: “page1”
}, {
“name”: “Phone Number”,
“type”: “phone”,
“title”: “Phone Number”,
“value”: null,
“placeholder”: “”,
“page”: “page1”
}, {
“name”: “Event Date”,
“type”: “date”,
“title”: “Event Date”,
“format”: “MM/dd/yyyy”,
“value”: null,
“placeholder”: “MM/DD/YYYY”,
“page”: “page1”
}, {
“name”: “Event Time”,
“type”: “text”,
“title”: “Event Time”,
“value”: null,
“placeholder”: “12:00 PM-3:00 PM”,
“page”: “page1”
}, {
“name”: “Event Description”,
“type”: “textarea”,
“title”: “Event Description”,
“value”: null,
“placeholder”: “Write a 4–5 sentence description of the purpose of the event, expected attendance, and a summary of the activities.”,
“page”: “page1”
}
]
}

The drag-and-drop form-building features are a bit more extensive. For example, they include formatting the form to display multiple fields in the same row. They can be explored by opening up forms to edit on the Organization workspace. We will also build the waiver form in this tutorial using drag-and-drop.

Building the Waiver Form

For the first time, we are about to build features from within the GUI of the workspace. The workspace GUI is important for airSlate’s document generation and flow automation. Go back to the workspace’s subdomain — here, https://blue-hills-park.airslate.com/.

If you click on “Workflows” in the vertical menu on the left, which will take you to subdomain /templates, you should see the Templates you added. Click “Configure” on the “Facility Use Waiver” Template, as shown.

Once you go to the new page after “Configure,” click on “Add documents” and then on “Form or survey.” You will see a menu on the left with different types of form fields you can add. When you click on the fields on the menu, you add them to the end of the form. When you click on the fields on the form, you can modify them.

Add and modify form fields as follows:

• The heading is already on the form. Change its name to “Blue Hills Park Picnic Area Waiver Form.”
• Add a single line text field “Full Name.”
• Add an email field “Email.”
• Add a date field “Event Date.”
• Assign each of the fillable fields to “Recipient 1,” the person applying to use the facilities, on the menu on the top right. On the menu on the top left, make sure “Recipient 1” is also the person filling out the form.

The form should now look like this.

Next, we will add some more complicated fields, also set for Recipient 1 to fill out. Go down the form field menu on the left and add a “Checkbox.” The checkbox should be called “How will you be using the park?”

It should have two options: “This event will involve building fires in designated firepits.” and “This event will involve the use or extraction of natural resources.” Delete the third option by moving your mouse onto it and clicking the “X” that appears on its right. Just before you delete the third option, the checkbox should look like this.

• Next, go back up the form field menu on the left. Add a multi line text field “If you checked that you are using or extracting natural resources, please describe and explain.”
• Add a Description field. Delete “Type a question” and paste the following text in the text box below it:

I agree to accurately represent the event’s activities in the park and abide by any and all rules set by Blue Hills Park and within this agreement. I agree that I will be responsible for the conduct of my group, which has been granted the use of the above named facilities, and shall conform to the official operating policies as established by the State of Massachusetts, and the Parks and Recreation Department.

I further agree to reimburse Blue Hills Park in full for the fee as agreed upon for the use of a park facility as well as any and all damage to the park facility. This includes but is not limited to: defacing of property, buildings or structures, or the natural state of the facility or park; failure to fully clean the facility, as assessed by the State of Massachusetts Parks and Recreation Department through its agents or employees following my use of the facility.

I, the undersigned, hereby agree to relinquish all claims, suits, attorney fees, damages, liability and any and all future rights to the same based on any and all negligent acts of the State of Massachusetts, the State of Massachusetts Parks and Recreation Department, Blue Hills Park, and any and all of the named agents and/or employees in connection with or incident to myself or my group’s use of any of the park facilities.

• Add Signature and Date fields.
• Rescale the Date field to be the width of the Signature field, and on the same row as Signature. You can do this by clicking once on the Date field and moving your mouse on top of the small circle at the right of the Date field. Your cursor will change into two arrows pointing left and right. Press and hold your mouse, dragging it to the left until the Date field is narrow enough to be on the same line as the Signature field.
• Make the Signature and Date fields required fields. You can do this by clicking on each field, then clicking on the “Required” checkbox on the right menu. Making a field required will make a red star appear next to its name on the form.

Congratulations! You have added all the fields for the applicant. The remaining fields, after the checkbox, should look like this.

However, you are not done creating the form. The remaining part of the form is intended for the park official. The park official will fill out whether the application to book the picnic area has been approved.

Click on the “Assign this field to” dropdown at the top right, where you had assigned the fields to “Recipient 1.” Then click on “+ Add roles.” You will see a popup of the steps in your workflow.

In the popup, click on the “+” below the step with “Recipient 1” and above “Finish.” You will see another step for “Recipient 2” appear. Now click “Apply.”

Create Radio button, Multi line text, Signature, and Date fields as shown in the image below. The steps for creating and editing a Radio button field are similar to the steps for creating and editing a Checkbox field.

We are now finished with the form. Click “Continue” to close the form, and you will see a Workflow in the “Facility Use Waiver” Template.

Connecting the Workflow Steps

Now that we’ve added all the forms, it’s time to connect them and activate them appropriately. airSlate’s specialty is in automating these processes, and so its services have a number of document automation capabilities. This tutorial will illustrate a few of these capabilities.

Embedding the Booking Form on the webpage

The booking form is the first form the user fills out, at index.html. You can obtain the link to embed the form at “Create a link to a Template” here. Enter the IDs of your Organization and the initial booking Template.

In your response, you will receive two URLs. The urls link allows authorized airSlate users to view the form’s settings, although they can no longer edit them once the links have been generated. The urls_embedded link allows the form to be embedded on a public page, as we will do.

Save the urls_embedded link you receive. We will now enter the following HTML code into picnic_area/index.html on your local machine, replacing <Enter your urls_embedded link here> with the urls_embedded link:

<! — MVP.css quickstart template: https://github.com/andybrewer/mvp/ →
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang=”en”>
<head>
<link rel="icon" href="https://via.placeholder.com/1x1">
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="description" content="Apply to book Blue Hills Park's picnic area">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Picnic Area Reservations</title>
</head>
<body>
<iframe id="bookings" src="<Enter your urls_embedded link here>" style="position:absolute;width:95%;height:95%" />
</body>
</html>

Now, when you run the local server and load http://localhost:8000/, you should see the initial booking form filling most of the page.

Activating the Waiver Form

After the booking form is submitted with an email address, the waiver form is emailed to that address. It is later emailed to the park staff member when the applicant has finished their part.

These steps, however, have not been set up. We will do that now.

After you created the waiver form and clicked “Continue,” you should have gone to an editable Flow setup. It would look something like this. Click on “Add autostart” because we are setting the waiver form to get sent automatically.

Click again on “Add autostart” on the popup that appears on the right, and select that you would like to start your Flow “From another Template” or “From another workflow.” Select “Picnic Area Reservations” as the source Template or workflow. Select the step on the “Select a Step” dropdown.

We will pre-fill some fields in this form with fields from the booking form. From the Booking Form source Workflow, select that you would like to import “Full Name,” “E-mail Address,” and “Event Date.” Select that these are mapped onto the “Untitled form” destination workflow, to the fields “singlelinetext1,” “email1,” and “date1,” respectively.

This is a lot, so I’ve given you a screenshot of what you should do. After you change these settings, scroll to the end of the list of settings on the popup that appears on the right because there are more you need to change.

You must trigger the Flow start when the booking form’s email address is not empty. Enter that right below where you indicated the pre-filling of fields, as shown below. Then click on “Apply Changes.” Click “Apply” right after to close the popup.

Next, you will indicate that the form should be sent to the email address the user has filled in as theirs. Click in the text field for the email of Recipient 1 on the Flow, and a tab “+Data variable” will appear. Click on “+Data variable.”

Select that the dynamic variable is from the document “Untitled form” and is “email1”.

When Recipient 1, the person applying to book the picnic area, is finished with their part of the form, the form needs to be sent to Recipient 2, the park official. Click in the text field for the email of Recipient 2 on the Flow, in the step after the one where you indicated Recipient 1’s email.

The tab “+Data variable” will pop up, as in the previous step, but do not click on it. Simply enter the park official’s email. You would probably want to use your own email as the proxy, so you receive the forms.

Customizing the messages

The last step is to customize the email messages the applicant and the park official receive when they are sent the forms to fill out. This can be done in the settings for each step – Recipient 1’s step and Recipient 2’s step in the workflow. The settings can be changed by clicking on the gear in the top right of the box showing the step.

Click the gear, and a menu will appear on the right. For both recipients, uncheck “Revoke access on documents completion” in that menu.

Then click to expand on “Recipient.” For Recipient 1, enter that they should receive an email with the subject “You’re invited to complete the Blue Hills Park Picnic Area reservation application”. Click “Apply.”

For Recipient 2, ensure that the “Recipient” expandable menu section says the email will be sent to the correct address. The subject and body should appear as shown below, using the “Data variable” tab to select the “singlelinetext1” (name) field of “Untitled form.”

Finally, on Recipient 2’s menu settings, you will expand on “Conditions” and make sure this step is set to run when the document data revision status is completed. Click “Apply.”

You might want to run these steps as a test to see whether they work. Finish the application by clicking on “Publish.”

Sweet?

Running the Program

The Blue Hills is a real park in the Boston area, Massachusetts, USA. Let’s imagine you are an instructor at a local university, applying to host a maple syruping party at its picnic area.

When you run the local server and go to its index.html page, you should see the initial booking form. Fill out and submit this form, indicating the email address where you would like to receive the waiver form.

You will be redirected to the “welcome” page. You should also have promptly received an email inviting you to complete the waiver form.

The form in the email will be partly filled out with full name, email, and event date. Complete and sign the form.

Once you have filled out and signed the form and clicked “Complete” on the bottom right, it will be sent to the park official. The subject of the email the park official receives should be “Sigmund Fox has applied to book the picnic area!” and its body should read “Please review and respond to Facility Use Waiver within three business days.”

Completed waiver forms, signed by both the applicant and the park official, can be downloaded from the Organization workspace. On the menu on the left, click “Workflows.” When the workflows appear, roll your mouse over “Facility Use Waiver” and click “Go to documents.” You will see the completed Flows.

For the Flow you want, click on “Download documents” to obtain a PDF copy of the waiver form, as well as a certificate that it has been signed by both parties.

If you’ve gotten to the end of this tutorial and built out the application, congratulations! Here is a picture of the Boston skyline taken from the Skyline Trail of the real Blue Hills.

These are only a few of the many document automation services provided by the API. To learn more, check out the rest of the Document Automation Hub API guide.

The post Forms API: An easy-to-use API for mobile-friendly web forms appeared first on airSlate Blog | Business automation.

Healthcare document management software streamlines and automates your patient communication workflow, making it easier and more efficient. The patient onboarding process, for example, is essential for taking patients into a healthcare facility and giving them a positive impression. A clunky patient onboarding process can be quite frustrating. However, a smooth and user-friendly digital onboarding process benefits both the patient and the provider.

With digital onboarding, the patient can fill out the form from home, on their own time, looking up required information as needed. They can receive immediate feedback on whether the information is complete and properly formatted. If the provider already has the information, they can help the patient by pre-populating form fields.

To stay competitive, it is becoming increasingly necessary for healthcare professionals to adopt a digital document process. This tutorial will show you how to build basic document workflow automation software and help you understand the importance of document automation in healthcare.

Here, we will build a simplified demo patient onboarding application for Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group, a fictional medical group. We will use airSlate’s Document Automation Hub APIs. airSlate is regularly recognized as a provider of some of the best document automation software.

The Document Automation Hub APIs support various document automation needs, such as dynamically generating documents, enabling conditional workflows, sending forms to multiple recipients, collecting secure eSignatures, and editing PDFs.The full list of functionalities is quite extensive and is in the Document Automation Hub user guide. A few of these document automation tools will be illustrated in this article.

The patient onboarding application

The patient onboarding workflow of this application is as follows:

1. Users schedule appointments at Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group through a PDF form on an open HTML page.
2. When an appointment scheduling form is submitted, the patient is emailed another form to fill out, where they can provide more medical information.

The application will run on your local machine using Python’s SimpleHTTPServer. To use SimpleHTTPServer, you will need to have Python installed — this tutorial uses Python 3. To use the Document Automation Hub APIs, you will also need a registered Document Automation Hub account.

In the directory of your choice on your local machine, create a folder called patient_onboarding containing two files: index.html and welcome.html. We’re leaving the file index.html blank for now. Later, we will embed the first forms in our document automation process into that page. Submission of that form will redirect you to welcome.html. Put the following code in welcome.html. It’s based on Andy Brewer’s MVP template, and you could probably copy and paste it. Here’s the code:

<!-- MVP.css quickstart template: https://github.com/andybrewer/mvp/ -->

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
   <link rel="icon" href="https://via.placeholder.com/1x1">
   <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/mvp.css">

   <meta charset="utf-8">
   <meta name="description" content="Welcome page for Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group">
   <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

   <title>Welcome! - Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group</title>
</head>

<body>
   <header>
       <h1>Welcome to Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group, and thank you for booking an appointment with us!</h1>
       <p>Check your email for next steps.</p>
   </header>
   <main>
           <!-- Image source: Ashashyou, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons -->
           <img alt="Thank-you-word-cloud" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Thank-you-word-cloud.jpg" style="display: block;margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto;width: 80%;" />
   </main>
   <footer>
       <hr />
       <p>
           <small>
               Questions? Contact airSlate at <a href="https://www.airslate.com/contact?utm_medium=article&utm_source=blog&utm_campaign=document_automation_hub_api&utm_content=9_2023-Building_an_Automated_Patient_Onboarding_App_With_APIs&utm_term=welcome_page">this link</a>.
           </small>
       </p>
   </footer>
</body>

</html>

In the main patient_onboarding directory, run the local server on the command line. My local machine is a Mac, and my command is as follows:

$ python3 -m http.server

Once the server starts, navigate in your browser to http://localhost:8000/welcome.html.

Now you have some nice pages to embed your forms in and redirect the user to on completion, so we will switch to building the actual document automation processes.

Authenticating with the API

It’s time to set up the API so you can make your first Document Automation Hub API requests. Go to the dashboard of your Document Automation Hub account and create a new application with the “Add Application” button on the top left, as shown below:

The application name is unimportant as long as you remember it. It should also be unique. Here, I’m naming it “Document Automation Hub Demo.” The application URL is even less important for this application, and I’m pointing it to the airSlate domain.

Once the application is created, click on its name where it appears on the Document Automation Hub account dashboard. You will get to a page that, going forward, this tutorial will call the application page. It shows the client ID, client secret, application URL, and “Code Grant,” “JWT Grant,” and “Implicit Grant” tabs. The next step is to get an authorization code for a Code Grant. A Code Grant is a type of authorization grant that requires the user to agree for you to access user data. Because of its extra security, it is the most suitable authorization grant for sensitive patient data. You can read the full documentation for how to get this authorization here or watch this video.

You need to use the authorization code to get the bearer token, valid for two days. The request for the bearer token can be copied from the application page. In the request, you must enter the redirect URI, client ID, client secret, and authorization code. Since the first three are copied automatically, the authorization code is the only part you must copy manually.

When you have successfully obtained the bearer token, copy and save the string called access_token which you receive in your response. The access token will enable you to authenticate your Document Automation Hub API requests.

This error is a known bug. You can avoid it by entering the username and password manually. If you cannot, you should contact airSlate Customer Support, describing the issue, to get proper access.

Creating Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group’s workspace

Now that you can authenticate, it’s time to build the document automation capabilities using the Document Automation Hub API. First, you will create Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group’s workspace as an organization that can store and run its own document workflow automation processes.

For one-off requests, the most convenient way to use the Document Automation Hub API is by running it on the production server, on the page of the documentation itself. To create Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group, go to this “Create a new Organization” page, enter your access_token in the “Token” field of “Auth,” specify that the API request is going to the production server, and enter the following in “Body”:

{
“name”: “Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group”,
“subdomain”: “byrd-metropolitan-medical”,
“category”: “HEALTH_CARE”,
“size”: “0–5”
}

On the API documentation page, the request will look like this:

Once you finish forming your request, click “Send API Request.” If the response successfully creates the organization, save the organization ID, which you will use in future requests.

If the subdomain is taken, you will receive a 422 “Unprocessable Entity” error as a response and will need to enter another subdomain. Although the application built in this tutorial uses the subdomain “byrd-metropolitan-medical,” it should not be a big deal to use another.

The Document Automation Hub API Guide’s pages for specific requests also include the code for making each request in various programming languages. Here is the cURL command for creating Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group’s workspace, for example:
https://gist.github.com/La-comadreja/4cd0ed87c9fba061a1d7bebef5252541#file-byrd_metropolitan_medical_group_curl 

Here is the Python3 code to do the same:
https://gist.github.com/La-comadreja/d4fb61b1a63a1786534695b0cae69214#file-byrd_metropolitan_medical_group_python 

On the page for each of the API commands, the code for running that command is also available in HTTPie, WGet, the Requests library of Python, JavaScript, Node, Go, C, Objective-C, OCaml, C#, Java, HTTP/1.1, Clojure, Kotlin, PHP, Powershell, R, Ruby, and Swift. So, you can embed API calls into almost any existing piece of code.

And now, if you go via browser to the subdomain you indicated in your request — for this tutorial, https://byrd-metropolitan-medical.airslate.com/ — you will see an actual, empty workspace. Time to add some document automation.

Organizations, Templates, and Flows

The workspace is described as the Organization in the airSlate API documentation. To enable it to have document flow automation, you need to make additional Document Automation Hub API requests to create structures within the workspace, which are called Templates and Flows.

A Template is a group of fillable documents and forms that can be sent to recipients for completion. Since Templates require all their forms to be included when they are sent to a recipient, we will create two Templates, one containing the appointment scheduling form and the other containing the new patient enrollment form. The new patient enrollment form is only sent after submitting the appointment scheduling form.

A Flow is a single run of the standard back-and-forth process for a Template’s documents and forms. For example, each time a person is hired, they might receive a different copy of the standard employment contract. A new Flow might be created for each new hire to send the contract to the new employee and their manager for signature.

We will create a single Flow in the appointment scheduling Template for all users to fill out the form. We will create a new Flow in the new patient enrollment Template for each time the new patient enrollment form is sent out.

Creating the Templates

The next step is to create the two Templates for holding the Documents. Go to “Create a new Template” in the documentation. Fill in your access_token in “Token” and your organization ID in “organization_id.” For the appointment scheduling Template, send the API request to the production server with the following body:

{
“name”: “Schedule Appointment”,
“description”: “Template for scheduling medical appointments”,
“redirect_url”: “http://localhost:8000/welcome.html"
}

Make sure the redirect_url is set to the “welcome” page of the local server you created, where the user will be redirected when the appointment scheduling form is submitted.

For the new patient enrollment Template, send the API request to the production server with the following body:

{
“name”: “New Patient Enrollment”,
“description”: “Template for the new patient enrollment form”,
“redirect_url”: “http://www.airslate.com"
}

Make sure you save both Template IDs for future API calls. Or, you can get a list of Templates in your Organization here.

airSlate’s Voluminous Libraries of Forms

Now it is time to add the forms. The Document Automation Hub API includes a library of over 400 forms for various uses. You can get this full list of forms by making a request to “Get a list of form templates” here, indicating that the response should return 500 results per page. You might want to use cURL to make the request on the terminal so that you can see all the results more easily.

Invoking “Get a list of form templates” generates IDs and other ways to access the forms, which expire in a few hours. You should see the information for the “Online Doctor Appointment Form” and “New Patient Enrollment Form,” two of the simpler forms in the library and the ones we will be using, along with the rest.

In case you were confused, the “Form templates” are not the same structure as the “Schedule Appointment” and “New Patient Enrollment” Templates we have just created. Going forward, we will call the “Form templates” forms when referring to their functionality and documents when referring to their structure. preview_file_url is a PNG preview of the form’s first part and is irrelevant to this tutorial.The forms retrievable from the API are just a few of the tens of thousands of pre-made forms available to airSlate users. airSlate workspaces include US Legal Forms, a complimentary library of over 85,000 legally binding contracts and forms for various purposes. In addition, it is possible to build forms from scratch.

Adding the Forms

When you go to your Organization’s dashboard — here, https://byrd-metropolitan-medical.airslate.com/ — you should now see that it has two Templates called “Schedule Appointment” and “New Patient Enrollment.” For each Template, click on “Configure.”

Once you go to the new page after “Configure,” click on “Add Documents” and then on “Library.” Search for the relevant forms by name in the Library — find the “Online Doctor Appointment Form” for the Schedule Appointment Template and the “New Patient Enrollment Form” for the New Patient Enrollment Template.

When you find the relevant form in the library, click on “Use Form” and watch the form load in a window. For the Online Doctor Appointment Form, select “Anyone” when prompted with “Assign Fields.” For the New Patient Enrollment Form, you can keep that the fields are assigned to “Role 1.”

To edit the form fields, click on them and you will see settings pop up on the right. We are editing the Online Doctor Appointment Form’s “Country” field. Click on that field and scroll down on the settings until you see Options. Enter “USA” and “Canada” as options, and click on “X” to remove the third option.

When you are done editing the form, click “Continue” at the bottom of the window. The form will be added to the Template. You should see an editable Flow setup, which we will revisit later.

Publishing the Online Doctor Appointment Form

The next step is to embed the online doctor appointment form into your application’s index.html. You can obtain the link to embed the form at “Generate a shareable link to a Template” here. Enter the IDs of your organization and the Schedule Appointment Template.

In your response, you will receive two URLs. The urls link allows authorized airSlate users to view the form’s settings, although they can no longer edit them once the links have been generated. The urls_embedded link allows the form to be embedded on a public page, as we will do.

Save the urls_embedded link you receive. We will now enter the following HTML code into patient_onboarding/index.html on your local machine, replacing <Enter your urls_embedded link here> with the urls_embedded link:

<! - MVP.css quickstart template: https://github.com/andybrewer/mvp/ →
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang=”en”>

<head>
<link rel="icon" href="https://via.placeholder.com/1x1">
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="description" content="Appointment scheduling for Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Home - Byrd Metropolitan Medical Group</title>
</head>

<body>
<iframe id="appointments" src="<Enter your urls_embedded link here>" style="position:absolute;width:95%;height:95%" />
</body>
</html>

Now, when you run the local server and load http://localhost:8000/, you should see the Online Doctor Appointment Form filling most of the page.

Setting Up the New Patient Enrollment Form

The last step is to modify the New Patient Enrollment Template’s Flow settings, including setting the New Patient Enrollment Form to be emailed to the user on submission of the Online Doctor Appointment Form.

After you have loaded the New Patient Enrollment Form and clicked “Continue,” you should see an editable Flow setup, as mentioned earlier. It would look something like this. Click on “Add autostart” because we are setting the New Patient Enrollment Form to get sent automatically.

Click again on “Add autostart” on the popup that appears on the right, and select that you would like to start your Flow “From another Template” or “From another workflow.” Select “Schedule Appointment” as the source Template or workflow. Select the step on the “Select a Step” dropdown.

We will pre-fill some fields in this form with fields from the appointment scheduling form. From the Online Doctor Appointment source Template, select that you would like to import “Full Name,” “Phone Number,” “Date of Birth,” and “E-mail Address.” Select that these are mapped onto the New Patient Enrollment Form to the fields “Name,” “Contact Number,” “Date of Birth,” and “E-mail,” respectively.

This is a lot, so I’ve given you a screenshot of what you should do. After you change these settings, scroll to the end of the list of settings on the popup that appears on the right because there are more you need to change.

You must trigger the Flow start when the Online Doctor Appointment Form’s E-mail Address is not empty. Enter that right below where you indicated the pre-filling of fields, as shown below. Then click on “Apply Changes.” Click “Apply” right after to close the popup.

Lastly, you will indicate that the form should be sent to the e-mail address the user has filled in as theirs. Click in the text field for the e-mail of Recipient 1 on the Flow, and a tab “+Data variable” will appear. Click on “+Data variable.”

Select that the dynamic variable is from the document “New Patient Enrollment Form” and is E-mail.

You might want to run these steps as a test to see whether they work. Finish the application by clicking on “Publish”.

Running the Program

When you run the local server and go to its index.html page, you should see the Online Doctor Appointment Form. Fill out and submit this form, indicating the e-mail address where you would like to receive the New Patient Enrollment Form.

You will be redirected to the “welcome” page. You should also have promptly received an email inviting you to complete the New Patient Enrollment Form.

The New Patient Enrollment Form arrives with several of its fields pre-filled, as specified in its Flow.

If you’ve gotten to the end of this tutorial and built out this application, congratulations! Enjoy these lollipops and check out some other features in airSlate’s Document Automation Hub API.

The post Building an automated patient onboarding app with APIs appeared first on airSlate Blog | Business automation.