Bruce,

You are correct that there is no way to directly submit a Nintex Form to DocuSign.  But you can generate a PDF file using the data from a Nintex Form with the Update Document action followed by the Convert Document action.

Here are the steps:

1. Make sure that each control/field in the Nintex Form is saved to a list column or database.
2. Create a template in MS Word that contains a content control for each field in your Nintex Form that you wish to display.
3. Store this template in a document library and reference it in the Update Document action.
4. Use Nintex workflow to retrieve the form values from the list or database table and store each value in a separate variable.
5. Within the Update Document action, map each variable to the appropriate Content Control.  This will generate a new Word document from your template with the live data.
6. With the Convert Document action, convert the new DOCX file to PDF (or you could optionally submit the DOCX file directly to DocuSign.)
7. Use the DocuSign Send Document action to send the new PDF (or DOCX) file for signature.

Here are a few caveats to consider:

• If your Nintex Form contains repeating sections that you wish to display on the PDF form, then this approach won't work.  It is possible to embed content controls in a repeating table in MS Word, but the process will require custom development.
• I assume your SharePoint environment is on-prem, right?  (Because if you are in Office 365, you could use the Document Generation actions to create a Word or PDF file, and this would support repeating sections out of the box.)

-Tom Castiglia

Tom:

Thanks for this very helpful reply.  I've already done something very similar to this when I implemented Vadim's workaround for printing forms to PDF (http://www.vadimtabakman.com/nintex-workflowforms-to-pdf.aspx).  The major drawback to this approach is that you have to maintain two version of the form, the Nintex form for user input and the Word doc for converting it to PDF.  When Nintex released the new Print-to-PDF feature earlier this year I happily abandoned this method but will revisit it for the DocuSign use case.  It would be great if Nintex would develop a way to do the same thing as a workflow action using the form data as input.

Regards,

Bruce

Bruce - I agree. The need to maintain two versions of the form is frustrating.  There have been calls for Nintex to implement the Print to PDF feature as a workflow action for exactly this reason.  I hope this happens.  Wish I had a better answer, but you can vote for this feature on the Nintex User Voice site: Workflow action to convert Nintex Form to pdf – Customer Feedback for Nintex

Hi Tom:

Done (I gave it 3 votes). Thanks for pointing me to this user voice topic. Meanwhile I'm working on the approach you mentioned.

Here's an update.  I've gotten this to work nicely based on you're suggestions, Tom, with one exception.  It's not really necessary (nor useful) to save every field on the form to a SharePoint list column.  The process works just fine pulling the  data out of the FormData XML.  This approach will allow the method to work with repeating sections as well, using loop structures in the workflow, although it does impose a limit on the number of rows in the repeating section (because the template has a fixed number of rows).

One nice little add-on that I've inserted into the template is a DocuSign custom tag that allows me to indicate where the user should sign the document and where the date gets placed.  I simply hide it using a white color font so it doesn't appear, but DocuSign can see it and that's all that matters.

Another approach, of course, is to use a DocuSign template and the Nintex WF PopulateTemplate action, as you discussed in your Inspirex talk. At this point I don't know which approach is better.  Both require maintaining two versions of the form, as we've discussed, which makes the whole thing pretty labor-intensive.

Thanks,

Bruce