Webhooks are notifications triggered when specific events occur. In the context of Yousign, these events represent a change in a Signature Request's status or actions taken by a Signer, Approver, Follower or a Contact.

You can create webhook subscriptions within the App in the section API > Webhooks or through our API. To get more information about the webhook subscription creation and the possible events, see Subscription.

To use a webhook, you need to set up a web service that is publicly available on the Internet. This kind of service is also known as a webhook listener. When one of these events occurs and matches with one of your webhook subscription, an HTTP POST request that contains webhook's payload is sent and your app uses it to perform actions.

When to use it

Using webhooks is particularly useful when you automate actions in reaction of specific events.

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Example

You can use Webhooks to record that a Signature Request has been completed for instance in your application or to download signed documents or audit trails once generated. If you added a custom question in your Signature Request using Text fields you can use Webhooks to record Signer's answers.

Using Webhooks is an alternative to polling, which means calling repeatedly the API to retrieve up-to-date data. Polling is not allowed on the API and Yousign applies a rate limiting policy to prevent you to do so. Moreover, by using webhooks you can benefit of the following advantages:

  • Webhooks are quickly sent to you and only when events occur,
  • Calls done to your webhook listener do not count in your API's rate limit on the API,
    limit,
  • You don't need to implement polling logic within your application.

Errors and retry

It may happen that a webhook delivery fail. In this case, it may be retry retried up to 8 times, depending of your webhook subscription. To get more information about our retry and failure policy, please see related section.