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Submitting Document Data via API

The Creodocs API allows you to submit document data for a template and returns a URL to the document PDF when it is successful. This means you don't need to interact with the Creodocs website to create documents. This method is primarily useful for software developers who need to automatically create documents as part of another product or service.

All API requests are charged to the billing group of the account making the request and cost the same number of credits as creating the document manually.

API Specifications

The API uses the JSON format to structure requests and responses. To verify your identity when making an API request, you will need to generate an API key as described on the API Keys Support page. Creating a document requires you to send your Creodocs user ID (yours is ), the template ID of the document you'd like to create, your API key and the document data for each variable. API requests must be made via POST to https://www.creodocs.com/api/create under a data key.

The table below details each of the required components of an API request and provides details on their expected values.

Attribute Description Allowed Values
user_id Your Creodocs user ID number Must be a number
template_id The template ID number you would like to use to create the document Must be a number
key Your secret API key The key provided to you by Creodocs
document_data Document data for all variables in the template An object of keys and values where keys are template variable IDs and values are arrays of document data. Unless the variable is in a multi-group, the array must contain one element. All variables in each multi-group must contain the same number of elements.

Example:

{
	"user_id": 12,
	"template_id": 52,
	"key": "b70b53f2c9e09fa836410bed18126c38b497b660cd7fcc72a6",
	"document_data": {
		"NAME": [
			"John Smith"
		],
		"DATE": [
			"20/04/2020"
		],
		"PARAGRAPHS": [
			"First paragraph text.",
			"Second paragraph text."
		],
		"OPTIONALSIGNATURE": [
			""
		]
	}
}
You can find an automatically populated template for making API requests for a given template under the Submit via API section of the Add Document Content page for the template.

Additional Document Data Specification Information

  • All template variables must be included in the API request, even if they are not required and no data is being provided for them. In this case, the variable data should just be an empty string (i.e. "").
  • Only multi-grouped variables can have more than one set of content supplied. In this case, all other variables in the same group must have the same number of content sets supplied. For example, VAR1 and VAR2 are in a group that allows multiple sets of content but only VAR1 is required. If you specify four sets of content for VAR1, you must also specify four sets for VAR2, even if they are empty strings.
  • All rules that normally apply to variable content (such as maximum length, type, disallowed characters, whether multiple sets of content are allowed, etc) apply for in API request. If document data submitted for any variable does not match the variable's requirements, your request will fail.

API Return Values

The API will return a JSON string containing three keys.

  1. request_outcome — will have a value of either success or failure
  2. document_url — if the request was a success, the value will contain a URL to the created document, otherwise it will be an empty string
  3. request_description — if the request was a failure, the value will contain the reason why, otherwise it will be an empty string

Example:

{
	"request_outcome": "failure",
	"request_description": "missing_input",
	"document_url": ""
}

Try Submitting to the API

Test API requests can be made using dedicated software for this purpose, but if you would like to make a quick test request you can use the form below. Paste the entire JSON request object and press Submit to send your request.