How do I view the PDF file downloaded from docusign?

Question

I am downloading the signed documents using the docusign getDocument API, but the downloaded file is coming in a weird format(json as per the Content-type header). What format is this and how can I convert it to a viewable/readable format.

Here is a snippet from the response -

%PDF-1.5 %ûüýþ %Writing objects... 4 0 obj << /Type /Page /Resources 5 0 R /Parent 3 0 R /MediaBox [0 0 595.32000 841.92000 ] /Contents [6 0 R 7 0 R 8 0 R ] /Group << /Type /Group /S /Transparency /CS /DeviceRGB >> /Tabs /S /StructParents 0 >> endobj 5 0 obj << /Font << /F1 9 0 R /F2 10 0 R /F3 11 0 R /F4 12 0 R /F5 13 0 R >> /ExtGState << /GS7 14 0 R /GS8 15 0 R >> /ProcSet [/PDF /Text /ImageB /ImageC /ImageI ] /XObject << /X0 16 0 R >> >> endobj 2 0 obj << /Producer (PDFKit.NET 21.1.200.20790) /CreationDate (D:20210429103256-07'00') /ModDate (D:20210429103256-07'00') /Author () /Creator () /Keywords <> /Subject () /Title () >> endobj 6 0 obj << /Length 4 >> stream q endstream endobj 7 0 obj << /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 7326 >> stream xœ½]ëo\u001c7’ÿnÀÿCã\u0016¸›YDm¾šd\u0007A\u0000É’\u001dçüZ[Þà\u0010ï\u0007Å’ma-É‘FÉæ¿?

user_8617118 · Answer

What language are you using, and are you using one of the DocuSign SDKs or a raw API call?

When I make a GetDocument call (specifically {{vx}}/accounts/{{accountid}}/envelopes/{{envelopeId}}/documents/combined, for example), the response headers have Content-Type: application/pdf and Content-Dispostion: file; filename=file.pdf, and the body of the response is the binary of the PDF file itself.

A snippet of mine begins with this:

%PDF-1.5
%����
%Writing objects...
4 0 obj
<<
/Type /Page
/Parent 3 0 R
/Resources 10 0 R
/MediaBox [0 0 612 792 ]
/Contents [11 0 R 12 0 R 13 0 R 14 0 R 15 0 R 16 0 R 17 0 R ]
/Group <<
/Type /Group
/S /Transparency
/CS /DeviceRGB

So it looks like whatever system you have picking up the response is including newlines and potentially other control characters.

You'll want to look at how your tools handle the API response: if you can dump the raw output from DocuSign to a PDF file, that would work, but with the extra formatting being injected it's no longer valid.

user_15716329 · Answer

I used this piece of code to save the response from DocuSign getDocument API to a PDF document-

envelopesApi.getDocument(ACCOUNT_ID, envelope_id, 'combined', function (error, document, response) {
if (document) {
  var filename = ‘docusign.pdf';
  fs.writeFile(filename, new Buffer(document, 'binary'), function (err) {
    if (err) console.log('Error: ' + err);
  });
 }
});

How do I view the PDF file downloaded from docusign?

2 Answers