DocuSign: How to send a radio group selection in recipient tabs? - docusignapi

Question

I have radio groups set up in my template and I want to pre-fill these tags using the REST API.
Please don't ask for code and/or request/response dumps. I don't have any code to show and I am asking for this because it is not documented. I want to know what sort of JSON I need to be producing so this is really not about my code or programming language.
(Anything below this line is half rant and half describes my failed attempts at finding the documentation for this feature. It might still be useful if somebody else has the exact same problem with me.)
Here is the documentation for the API I am trying to use. There is an example for textTabs but radioGroupTabs is not even mentioned here. It is mentioned here but I can't make much out of the "null", obviously I should be sending something other than null.
Moving on, the only useful information I can find on the radio groups is about how to create them in a template, it's here. This page also doesn't mention anything about pre-filling the values for a recipient. But it's linked from here (see tabs) anyway. There is a bit of information here:
value: if an X, this is the selected radio button. Only one radio button in a group can be selected.
And then just before this it says:
selected: Sets if this is radio button is selected. Use true/false to show the value is selected or not. Only one radio button can be true.
So we learn there are only just two ways to specify a radio widget selected. Of course this applies when you are creating the widget.
Nevertheless I tried to make requests assuming this would also work for pre-filling I got this helpful error message:
{
"errorCode": "UNSPECIFIED_ERROR",
"message": "Object reference not set to an instance of an object."
}
When I search the support forum I've found this, it's not exactly the same with my problem, I'd be happy to be able to set the wrong radio widget selected (as opposed to getting the UNSPECIFIED_ERROR) but this post is about the XML API.
I started my frantical search for the new topic button, it is so well placed you can usually find it in less than 10 minutes. I remember I used to go to my profile and then click something there... Then I did what every rational developer would do in the first place and went back to the post URL and read the breadcrumbs; Dev Zone section was renamed as Dev Zone (MOVED TO STACK OVERFLOW - Use tag DocuSignAPI). So here I am.
Could anyone please tell where this feature is documented or maybe provide a sample JSON please?

Answer 1

You've found the correct page for how to create radio buttons, not sure why you're having trouble using that resource. You've mentioned that's the code to CREATE the radio button tabs and not send them. That's not correct - the request body to send them is the same exact body only that the status property of the request changes from created to sent.
I just tested sending two radio buttons with the first button selected by default and it worked fine for me. Here is the full request body I used for my document signature request, this should work for you as well:
{
"emailBlurb": "Testing DocuSign radio buttons",
"emailSubject": "Custom PHP script",
"status": "sent",
"documents": [
{
"documentId": "1",
"name": "test.pdf"
}
],
"recipients": {
"signers": [
{
"email": "john.doe#docusign.com",
"name": "John Doe",
"recipientId": "1",
"tabs": {
"signHereTabs": [
{
"xPosition": "100",
"yPosition": "200",
"documentId": "1",
"pageNumber": "1"
}
],
"radioGroupTabs": [
{
"documentId": "1",
"groupName": "RadioGroup1",
"radios": [
{
"pageNumber": "1",
"selected": "true",
"value": "X",
"xPosition": "300",
"yPosition": "75"
},
{
"pageNumber": "1",
"selected": "false",
"xPosition": "350",
"yPosition": "75"
}
]
}
]
}
}
]
}
}
To add to this, the above example uses absolute positioning to position the radio buttons on the document. The other way of specifying tab locations in DocuSign is by using what's called "Anchor Tagging". With anchor tagging, instead of positioning based on coordinate systems, you can you can position your tabs with respect to document content. Please see the following two links to learn how to use anchor tagging, it's quite easy to switch to this method:
Anchor Tagging Introduction - Look at the "Tab Positioning" section
Related Stack Overflow Link