What’s New with DocQ: August 2021 version

August! Wow, and my mind was still stuck in June. With a third of the year almost over, we have some major feature enhancements to DocQ that will make you swoon 🤩 Okay, maybe just more along the lines of general excitement.

We have another way to eSign (can’t have too many, right?), the ability to Save the webform (a pretty cool and much needed feature), Regular Expression field validation (more on this later), and the obvious bug fixes.

Another new way to eSign

So, as you may all be aware, this will be the third way to get eSignature with DocQ. Before we introduce the new way, let’s review the first two.

The first way is via the workflow step, where you would go into DocQ, setup a workflow step specific to the collection of an eSignature, like shown below:

The second way, which we introduced in our July release, is where you include the collection of an eSignature within the setup of your document template. Shown here below:‍‍‍

This second way is our favorite and preferred. However, there is now a third way, which is a slight variation from the second. You may have noticed that when you go into the document template screen, there is a new “Sign document in the preview page” checkbox within the “Share” section, when “Allow Preview” is enabled, as seen below:

A small change, but we like providing options and flexibility to our users, which is … kinda what we’re known for and proud of it.

Saving the Webform

Now, this one, [pause for dramatic effect] this one is really exciting to introduce, because, not only is this feature the one we’ve been working tirelessly on implementing, it was also one that many of our customers and partners have been looking forward to: Saving the Webform.‍

Pretty sweet! Before you go asking why the need for the access code, well, let me remind you, security and adhering to it is always top of mind for us. Besides, some of the information that is collected could be private and personal information. This is the best we can do without breaking any security best practices AND also providing the best user experience DocQ can provide.

Regular Expression: field validation

Okay, for those of you non-developers and non-programmers out there, when you read: Regular Expression, you might be wondering what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks are you talking about.

Not to worry, to put it simply, a regular expression is a set of “rules” that you can use to verify if a specific text (usually) fits within the rules.

As an example, this is a regular expression: /cat/ (“rule”), this means, that if I had a sentence that says, “The cat in the bag is not a hat”, then according to the “rule”, the sentence is a valid sentence, because it has the word “cat” in it. But, if the sentence was: “The CAT in the bag is not a hat”, then the sentence is not valid, because “cat” (the “rule”) is not the same as “CAT”.

Okay, so why is this such a cool feature to highlight you might ask. Well, now you can make your own custom regular expressions to validate any input within the webform. As an example, the below is a “rule” (i.e. regular expression) to check if the text provided is a Social Security Number:

^([1-9])(?!1{2}-1{2}-1{4})[1-9]{2}-[1-9]{2}-[1-9]{4}

This one below, checks if the text provided is a valid US Phone Number:

^(([0-9]{3}) |[0-9]{3}-)[0-9]{3}-[0-9]{4}$

And, if you get fancy enough, you can validate almost any “text” that you want validated in a web form. That makes this feature even more powerful than the other two mentioned above. We think so at least 😄

In any case, there are plenty of good tutorials out there on regular expressions, but we definitely recommend the following: Learn Regex: A Beginner’s Guide and/or Learn regex – Crash course for beginners

However, not to worry, we’ve built some pre-defined ones within DocQ:

Additionally, when you get adventurous, feel free to copy an existing one and modify it to your own liking via the “Manually” drop-down option, and you can save it, so other DocQ users can utilize what you’ve built. Alternatively, befriend a developer (I am sure you have at least one) and have them build your Regular Expressions for you 😉

This concludes our featured feature releases for the month of August.

Along with the bug fixes, we also have some other features that we released. As always, if you want to check out the full list, login to DocQ, click on the bell icon on the top right screen and see all of those other features.

A hui hou (until next time)! 🤙

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