E-signature in Thingworx applications

[Sruthi]

Hi,

How to bring the e-signature feature in Thingworx foundation applications?

[PaiChung]

Not sure what your actual requirements are, but usually we will capture 'Current User' or 'Sign Off user' and date/time and associate that with the appropriate meta data.

[Sruthi]

we are generating reports in our customer application. Customer wants to verify there is no irregular data values in the report and sign it (e-signature). Is it possible with LDAP configurations in Thingworx?

[VladimirRosu]

Hi Sruthi,

Pai commented right in the previous post, in the sense the requirements are not very clear for us (eg: are you required to sign with a TLS certificate? are you required to store the signed reports as a file ? etc.)

In your case, the fact that the customer wants to verify there are no irregular data values is not related technically to the signing process (they are totally separate).

Which leaves us with the signing.

Typically the signing process can mean adding some sort of metadata (again, like Pay suggested) to your report, like the Signing User and date time.

I would do this typically by using a service which tries to authenticate again to ThingWorx by using the password the user inserts (User is the CurrentUser so you don't need to ask for it again). The main content of the service would be a GetText (I believe). ThingWorx would receive that auth attempt (from within its own service, to be clear), and based on the password would either reject or accept the request, and if it accepts it, you can decide as a developer to say that the document is signed, and populate those fields.

Alternatives exist, like popping up a dialog that just asks the current user to sign the document (yes/no)...

[Sruthi]

there is a e-sign functionality in wind chill. reference video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19BzgWq7X6E . Here they are signing the diagram sheets. Likewise, we need to put e-signature in a text box/area in mashup page and download it as pdf.

[VladimirRosu]

The link above is a customization by a PTC partner that just embeds the signature in a drawing.

However, pure Windchill uses the same basic mechanism as described in my post above. Please check this article and this help center link for more details about how Windchill does this.

You'll see in it that it basically contains two built in e-signature adapters: one requires just the password, and the other both the user and password.

The principle they use is that you should have some code that picks up the credentials and then tries to re-authenticate (as said above the GetText is a good start).