Forms as a Cloud Service - Communications APIs lets you create, assemble, and deliver brand-oriented and personalized communications such as business correspondences, documents, statements, claim processing letters, benefit notices, claim processing letters, monthly bills, and welcome kits. You can use Communications APIs to combine a template (XFA or PDF) with customer data to generate documents in PDF, PS, PCL, DPL, IPL, and ZPL formats.
Consider a scenario where you have one or more templates and multiple records of XML data for each template. You can use Communications APIs to generate a print document for each record. The result is a non-interactive PDF document. A non-interactive PDF document does not let users enter data into its fields.
Forms as a Cloud Service - Communications provides on-demand and batch APIs (asynchronous APIs) for scheduled document generation:
Synchronous APIs are suitable for on-demand, low latency, and single record document generation use cases. These APIs are more suitable for user-action based use cases. For example, generating a document after a user fill a form.
Batch APIs (Asynchronous APIs) are suitable for scheduled high throughput multiple document generation use cases. These APIs generate documents in batches. For example, phone bills, credit card statements, and benefits statements generated every month.
A synchronous operation is a process of generating documents in a linear manner. These APIs are classified as single-tenant APIs and multi-tenant APIs:
Single-tenant API operations support two type of authentication:
Basic authentication: Basic authentication is a simple authentication scheme built into the HTTP protocol. The client sends HTTP requests with the Authorization header that contains the word Basic followed by a space and a base64-encoded string username:password. For example, to authorize as admin / admin the client sends Basic [base64-encoded string username]: [base64-encoded string password].
Token-based authentication: Token-based authentication uses an access token (Bearer authentication token) to make requests to Experience Manager as a Cloud Service. AEM Forms as a Cloud Service provides APIs to securely retrieve the access token. To retrieve and use the token to authenticate a request:
Adobe recommends using token-based authentication on a production environment.
To use Synchronous APIs, the following is required:
An organization typically has multiple templates. For example, one template each for credit card statements, benefits statements, and claim applications. Upload all such XDP and PDF templates to your Experience Manager instance. To upload a template:
The API reference documentation provides detailed information about all the parameters, authentication methods, and various services provided by APIs. The API reference documentation also provides API definition file in the .yaml format. You can download the .yaml file and upload it to Postman to check functionality of the APIs.
Only members of forms-users group can access Communications APIs.