pydocusign provides templates of DocuSign's notification callbacks

[benoitbryon]

As a developer of software that uses DocuSign API via pydocusign,
in order to test the behaviour of an HTTP service that receive DocuSign's notification callbacks,
I want to fake these DocuSign's notification requests.

I do not want to follow a complete DocuSign workflow, mostly because:

• it is quite long to create an envelope and sign it (several remote API calls)
• it is quite hard to automatically sign a document (at the moment, I do not know howto)
• while I'm developing a web service, it is usually unreachable from the internet, i.e. DocuSign servers won't be able to send notifications to the service...

So, I'd like the following things:

• tools to generate requests that fake/mock/stub/whatever DocuSign's notification requests. For the body contents, templates may be a good option.
• if possible, tests to validate that pydocusign's templates are up to date and actually look like the ones sent by DocuSign itself... At the moment, I do not know how to achieve this feature.

[benoitbryon]

When I think about templates, I think about Jinja2 or other template engines. But this would be a dependency used for test purpose only. So as a developer, in order to run my pydocusign-based application, I would install (automatically, as a pydocusign's dependency) Jinja2, even if I do not use it at runtime.

[benoitbryon]

I would install Jinja2, even if I do not use it at runtime.

Isn't it a bit overkill?

An option for this issue would be to use http://diecutter.io template rendering service:

• create templates in pydocusign repository
• optionnally add a HTML form to submit data manually (human user interface)
• in pydocusign's tests, use requests to generate content using templates, data and diecutter generator

Third-party pydocusign-based applications would also be able to use these resources online: diecutter with templates provided by pydocusign.

A drawback of this solution would be performance: generating files using online templates and online HTTP service is slower than generating files using local templates and local software.

Another drawback would be to depend on online service availability.

[benoitbryon]

Proposal:

• create the templates using Jinja2 markup
• (optionally create HTML form as human user interface)
• at first, use http://diecutter.io to generate the files. See if it works and if it is enough for tests. It may be enough.
• later, if performances are too bad, consider adding Jinja2 as a dependency