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matthewcocook

Hi, 

I'm looking for help on getting started with an integration layer for my box platform app. I went on one of the developer webinars where you can ask questions and asked the best way to allow integrations to various external features, such as docusign, adobesign, office 365... 

 

I got a great answer, which is that you can create an interstitial app, which would do onion routing i.e. you would forward users to your own box app. It would directly trigger another integration, i.e. docusign, then when the docusign integration returned, it would go back into your box app and you would forward along the user back into your system, and return information you needed back into your system. This would work excellently for our needs, and allow us to add additional integrations very rapidly. 

 

For the life of me can't find any examples or documentation on how to get started with this approach. Any information, direction (sample code!) would be very welcome.   

 

Thanks, 

-Matt

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3 comments

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  • jcleblanc

    Hi ,

    Unfortunately I'm not familiar with the webinar content, but let me see if I can provide some guidance.

    Typically what you'll want to have in the application is to use Box's systems to visualize the content. So basically you would have the content stored in a Box application then use a UI tool such as Box Elements to uses Box's integrations with those application types to load the content. Here are some links that might help:

    • Box Elements: These will be the UI components that will allow you to preview content stored on Box. 
    • Box embed: This will allow you to display files as HTML 5 components, so they will work cross-functionally between environments.
    • Setting up a JWT app: If you want to work directly with the file content (download / upload / etc) you'll want to set up an application. This will guide you through that.

    Hope that helps, but if there is something specific that you'd like to delve down into I'd be happy to jump in.

    Jon

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  • matthewcocook

    Thanks  

     

    We have all the basics (upload, permissions, search, view, annotate, ... ) working, what we're trying to do is document signing (adobe sign and docusign) and collaborative editing (office365 and google docs). I want to just trigger the existing box integrations rather than re-write from scratch. 

     

    I've tried the 'box open with' functionality, and it's not production ready. The google sheets integration is flakey (and labeled beta), and the adobe sign integration never worked correctly, and now appears to be disabled on box's end. 

     adobe sign error page.PNG

     

    Any guidance would be great, thanks. 

     

    -Matt

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  • jcleblanc

    Hi ,

     

    Beyond working with the systems that you've already mentioned, the only other one that I would test out would be Box Embed to programmatically inject the Box file / folder visualizer to leverage off of the Box file access capabilities. That should mimic the capabilities of the core Box web app. 

     

    - Jon

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