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A document is one agreement that you send once. When you send the same kind of agreement again and again, you don’t build each document from scratch: you start from a template, or you publish a form that people fill in themselves.

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Compare documents, templates, and forms

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Templates

A template holds the fields, parties, and settings of a kind of document, such as an employment contract or an NDA. Templates have their own fields and parties, managed with the /templates/{id}/fields and /templates/{id}/parties endpoints. Fields have the same shape as on a document, and a template party nests its company in company, as a document party does. To create a document from a template, send templateId to POST /documents:
The new document gets a copy of the template’s fields and parties. Changing the template later doesn’t change documents you already created. If you send parties, they replace the template’s parties, and sajn removes the signature and initials boxes that were placed for the template’s parties. The usual flow from a template is the following:
  1. Create the template in the sajn editor, and set a key on every value you want to fill in, such as salary or start-date.
  2. Create a document from the template, with the real parties.
  3. Fill in the values by key with PATCH /documents/{id}/field-values. For more information, see Fields.
  4. Send the document.
To list the documents created from a template, call GET /documents?templateId= with the template ID. For more information, see Templates and forms and Managing templates.

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Forms

A form is a public link that anyone can open, without an account. The visitor answers the form’s questions, and sajn creates a document from the form, fills in the answers, and sends it to the visitor to sign. Use a form for sign-ups, applications, and order forms, where you don’t know the signer in advance. A form owns its own document base: fields, parties, and settings. You create it blank, or as a copy of a template. The copy is independent, so later changes to the template don’t affect the form. One of the form’s parties is the respondent, the SIGNER slot that the visitor fills. A form goes through the following steps:
  1. Create a draft form, blank or from a templateId.
  2. Configure its questions, fields, and parties, and select the respondent party.
  3. Publish the form. The user who publishes becomes the sender of every document the form creates, and must be allowed to send without approval.
  4. Share the form’s public URL.
  5. Read the answers with GET /forms/{id}/submissions, or subscribe to the form.submitted webhook event.
Every submission creates an ordinary document. It follows the normal document lifecycle, and you read it with the document endpoints. To stop new submissions, unpublish the form. For more information, see Managing forms.

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Next steps

Fields

Field types, keys, and the values parties fill in.

Templates and forms guide

Create a document from a template and fill it in.