Top 5 all-time DocuSign API questions
Where were you on September 27, 2010? It was a Monday. Now, why is that day important, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you why. On that day the first ever question related to DocuSign was asked on Stack Overflow using the newly created docusignapi tag. Since then, more than 5,300 questions have been asked by developers like you, and many of them have also been answered. This is an excellent way to get your questions answered and engage with experts inside and outside DocuSign.
Some of these experts have been busy answering hundreds of questions over the years. Our Top Users page shows the leaderboard for questions and answers in the DocuSign API on Stack Overflow:
This list includes some familiar names of a few of our DocuSign for Developers blog authors, such as Larry Kluger, Drew Martin, Matt King, and your humble servant :)
Over the years some popular questions got answered in this forum, but we never took the time to look at which were the most impactful and celebrate them. There are two metrics that can be used: total number of views a question gets and the number of upvotes for an answer. The former is more of an indicator of the popularity of the inquiry, while the latter is a good indication of the usefulness of the answer provided.
Here are the top five questions based on the total number of views:
Fifth place
Fifth place goes to a question by Dan that was asked way back on October 22, 2013. His question got more than 6,000 views and was upvoted seven times. Dan needed to create envelopes from templates but also fill information in the tabs before the envelopes were sent. Kim Brandl provided an elaborate answer that includes screenshots and all the information needed to complete the task. Her answer was upvoted seven times.
Fourth place
Fourth place goes to a question about resending emails to recipients. Jonathan’s question was asked back on February 4, 2014 and got more than 6,000 views and nine upvotes. The question has multiple answers, but the most elaborate and useful one was given by Kim Brandl and her answer was upvoted 16 times. The scoop? You need to add resend_envelope=true as a parameter in your endpoint URL.
Third place
In third place we have a question that was asked on May 5, 2015. The question is about the eSignature SOAP API and it got more than 7,000 views and was upvoted four times. The developer is using Python and trying to parse the XML response from the SOAP API. The answer was upvoted six times, and my guess is that it’s useful beyond the DocuSign example that was given.
Second place goes to
Second place goes to a question that was asked by Marko back on May 16, 2016. This question was viewed more than 8,000 times and has been upvoted four times. Marko implemented a basic eSignature API code flow and wanted to know how to set up a webhook for events about the envelope. Larry Kluger gave an excellent answer with a detailed explanation and links to code examples about DocuSign Connect.
And the top question is…
In first place with more than 38,000 views and upvoted 19 times came a question that was asked on July 22, 2020 by Jack. Jack was trying to use JWT Authentication with the DocuSign Node.js code examples and was having some issues. Matt King explained his issue with the PEM file perfectly and his answer was upvoted 21 times! Matt’s answer was upvoted more than any other answer for any question about the DocuSign APIs. Great job, Matt!
You too can answer questions on Stack Overflow, and you don’t have to be an expert on all things DocuSign. If you know the answer, feel free to submit it and help fellow developers in their work to integrate the DocuSign APIs.
