Understand Signature Field | Zoho Creator Help

Signature

The signature field allows a user to draw their signature and thus enables you to collect electronic signatures. This field comes in handy when you require your users to authenticate (by signing) the data they submit through your form.

Features

With respect to the user-experience of the signature field on a form, you can:

When your users sign (in the signature field) and submit your form, the signature is saved as a Portable Network Graphics (.PNG) file. This enables you to view the entered signatures as images, in a  report .

Example

  • Order management: Imagine that you sell some products and are building an app to manage the orders. You can add a signature field in the form through which users place their orders. If you make this signature field  mandatory , your users will be able to place their orders only when they enter a signature.

Things to know

  • Currently, uploading a signature in this field is not supported. It needs to be drawn.
  • Data stored in the signature field cannot be manipulated using Deluge.

Drawn signature's name

When your users draw a signature in this field, the file's name is set in the following format:

<unique_number>_<file_name>

The file's name is prepended by an underscore (_) and a system-generated number that uniquely identifies that signature in your account

URL format to download a signature

A signature stored in the signature field can be downloaded using the following URL:

https://<domain>/<account_owner_name>/<appLinkName>/<reportLinkName>/<fieldLinkName>/download/fileName

where,

  • domain  will be DC-specific. For example, you'll need to use  creatorexport.zoho.com  if your account is in Zoho's US data center, and  creatorexport.zoho.eu  if in the EU data center.
  • account_owner_name  contains the user name of the Creator application's account owner and the link name of the application.
  • reportLinkName  is the link name of the report where the corresponding signature field is displayed.
  • fieldLinkName  is the  link name  of the corresponding signature field. 
  • fileName  is the corresponding signature's name.  Learn more

 For example, imagine that you’ve built an  Order management  application. In this application, you have created a form named  Order Details  and added a signature field in this form through which users place their orders after entering the required details. When you access the  Order Details  report, you may want to download their signatures. To do this, you can configure a custom action in your report such that when you click the button  Download sign , the signature is downloaded as an image. This custom action has the above URL format constructed as follows:

BaseURL = " https://creatorexport.zoho.com" + zoho.appuri + "<reportLinkName>/<fieldLinkName>/download" + input.<fieldLinkName>; 
openURL( BaseURL, “window type”);

where,

  • BaseURL  is a variable that refers to the URL you have constructed
  • zoho.appuri  returns the application details in the format:
     /<account_owner_name>/<application_link_name>/
  • input.<fieldLinkName>  returns the  filename  of each file stored in the corresponding signature field
  • The  openUrl  Deluge task is used to redirect the user to the specified URL. This URL can be opened in the same window, new window, parent window, popup window, or iframe

Now, when you access the  Order Details report,  you can see the  Download sign  button:

In the above image, Megan is the <account_user_name> and order-management is the <application_link_name>

Tip: This URL format can be used to download files from the file upload, image, audio, video and signature fields.
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