We're using the DocuSign REST API and utilising Webhooks to receive the various envelope and recipient events that occur over the lifetime of an envelope.
We're also using SigningGroups within our implementation and I've noticed there's some scenarios when webhook events don't get sent off to us, when it feels like they really should.
Scenario:
1 - An envelope is sent to a Signing Group that contains two different users; UserA & UserB.
A webhook event is sent with the recipient Username as 'Signing Group 1', the email address is empty and status of 'Sent'.
2 - UserA visits the signing ceremony upon receiving the notification email from DocuSign, but at this stage, does not sign anything.
A webhook event is sent with the recipient Username now changed to 'UserA' and email address now set to UserA's email address. The recipient status is now 'Delivered'.
3 - UserA decides not to sign now, but to 'Finish Later', and in doing so, this releases the lock against this signatory, so as UserB could now visit the signing ceremony if they so wish.
A webhook event is NOT SENT, despite DocuSign knowing that UserA is no longer specifically assigned as the signing group recipient. If I perform an API call to get the recipients for the envelope at this stage, we can see that the recipient username has gone back to the Signing Group name 'Signing Group 1' and the email address is now empty again, as it's no longer with a specific individual within the signing group.
This feels wrong - Our system has not been notified that UserA is now no longer assigned (and locking) the signing process from any other user in the signing group.
4 - UserB now visits the signing ceremony (as UserA is not locking it any more), but at this stage does not sign yet.
A webhook event is NOT SENT, despite a completely different user within the signing group now viewing & locking the signing process from any other user in the signing group. Our system still thinks that UserA is assigned and viewing/locking the signing process.
5 - UserB now signs the documents and finishes. This completes the envelope.
A webhook IS NOW sent, informing us that UserB has 'Signed' and as a result the envelope is completed. We never even knew that UserA had left the signing ceremony and that UserB had since viewed the envelope.
Again, this feels wrong, especially seeing as DocuSign has all this information against the envelope if we were to manually poll the status of the envelope and the recipients within it, but the point of using Webhooks is to get away from having to poll the DocuSign API.
This behaviour is the same regardless of whether we use DocuSign 'Connect', or if we configure webhook events at an envelope level. We have ensured that all available envelope and recipient events have been enabled when configuring 'Connect' or our envelope level events.
Does anyone know why this is, or better, if there's a way to start receiving these missing events, as it's not keeping our system as up to date as it would be if we were to manually poll the API?
As a side note to the above, an additional observation I've made this morning is that it would appear whenever a signatory uses the 'Finish Later' option, whether they're in a signing group or not, this does not appear to trigger any form of webhook event!
Again I find this very strange because the webhook response data contains statuses for ach of the signing tabs in each document, for each signatory, yet if I sign 3 out of 4 tabs in a document within the signing ceremony, then click 'Finish Later', a webhook event is NOT generated. So despite DocuSign knowing which tabs have been signed by this user, they're not informing us via webhooks that 3 out of the 4 tabs have been signed, so our system still thinks that whilst a user may have 'viewed' the envelope - they haven't actually signed anything yet. Why include the different tab statuses for ach document and each recipient in the webhook response data if they're not going to reflect the current state (despite DocuSign knowing this data)?