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 October 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 PSPDFKit’s default signing experience, then there’s no migration needed, and PSPDFKit will automatically use the newer Electronic Signatures UI.

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

The default value of PdfFragment.getSignatureStorage changes to null when using Electronic Signatures. To restore the previous default storage functionality of saving the signature annotations to a database, set a SignatureStorage in the PdfFragment.setSignatureStorage like this:

override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
    val storage: SignatureStorage = DatabaseSignatureStorage
        .withName("MyCoolSignatureDatabase")
    pdfFragment.setSignatureStorage(storage)
}

@Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    final SignatureStorage storage = DatabaseSignatureStorage
        .withName("MyCoolSignatureDatabase");
    getPdfFragment().setSignatureStorage(storage);
}

The signatureSavingStrategy property of PdfConfiguration is used in the same way by both the older signatures functionality and Electronic Signatures.

To present the UI for creating an electronic signature, use ElectronicSignatureFragment instead of SignaturePickerFragment.

The older UI only supported drawing a signature. To keep the same feature set with the Electronic Signatures UI, set the PdfConfiguration’s signatureCreationModes to SignatureCreationMode.DRAW.

For more ways to configure the new UI, see the options in ElectronicSignatureOptions. These can be passed to ElectronicSignatureFragment when opening the UI programmatically, or the same options can be configured using the PdfConfiguration.

The older signatures UI supported allowing the user to create a digital signature by selecting a certificate from a list of registered signers. When using Electronic Signatures and Digital Signatures, please use the Signer API to add a digital signature. See Using Electronic Signatures and Digital Signatures Together for more details.

If the older signatures functionality met a need you had that isn’t met by Electronic Signatures, please contact us to discuss your use case and see how we can expand the capabilities of Electronic Signatures.