Bulk Download tool

Whether you are in a group or organization that is part of Adobe Acrobat Sign for enterprise and process thousands of documents, or you want to quickly download multiple documents. The bulk download tool is a game changer. You might be familiar with downloading agreements via the Adobe Acrobat sign dashboard or through the rest API, but these processes only allow for single document downloads. But a few notes before we continue. Remember, the Bulk Download tool is only for enterprise accounts and can only download completely signed agreements.

To get the Bulk Download tool, you will need to contact Adobe Acrobat Sing support. My demo today will be for Windows, but the tool is also available for Mac OS users as well. In our case, we will get a compressed file. We can then download it wherever we like, since we will then compress or extract the file in an upcoming step.

Before we extract the file, let’s set up the folder for the extracted files. For this example, I’m going to set up a new folder called agreements in my documents folder. Next we will extract the download. This is the compressed default name of the Bulk Download tool sent by the Adobe Sign Support Team. When we select extract all, it will bring up a dialog box on where we want to extract it. Well, we want to save it to the agreements folder. We just set up. An easy way to do this is just to copy the file path from the File Explorer window and paste it into this box. All we need to do is click Extract All. Once it’s extracted, we will see that an application named download has been added to our agreements folder. Perfect.

Now we need to create a text document for the users. We want to download the agreements from. To keep things simple, we will place this in the same folder as the download application. An easy way I like to do this is by right clicking in the folder, then mousing down to new. This will pull up a few files we can create within the folder. Then we can select Text Document from this list. Let’s rename the file to users and open it. Here we can enter the email addresses for the users. There are two things we need to keep in mind. First, that there are no spaces before or after the email address. Second, that there is only one email address per line.

Once the email addresses are entered, we can save and then we can close the file.

With all of these files in place. We are now ready to download the agreements. To run the download application. We’re going to use Command Prompt in windows. To do this I like to go down to the windows icon in my toolbar and search command. Here we go. We have a few options here, but since we must run this download application in an elevated mode or as an administrator, we will pick run as administrator. If you don’t see this option, you might not have local administrative rights. Notice that when the command prompt opens, we can see it has administrator as a prefix. My windows are looking a little messy, so let me move them around a bit so you can see what I’m doing.

Okay, great. Now we’re ready to start. First we need to get the location of where the download application is. We can easily do this by clicking in the explorer window and copy the file path. Before we paste the file path, we will type out CD and then a single space. Perfect. Now we can paste in the file path. We need to run this. So hit enter. We are in the location. We need to be. Now we’re ready to get into building a command. Here is the final command. It might look a bit daunting at first, but let me walk you through it to help you see the patterns. Let me add a bit of color to the command. Okay, a little bit better. Let’s break this down further to a template. All we need to do is enter data in the various colored text areas. Since the text might feel a bit small, I’m going to enlarge it so you can see it a little more clearly on your screen. Okay, let’s start building. First thing we need to do is get an off access token, but we need to do a few things to create it. To do this, we will log in to Adobe Acrobat Sign account as an admin. From the homepage we navigate to the Account tab. Then we scroll down to the Acrobat Sign API. Click this and then click on API information. Now that we are on this page, let’s click the link that says Integration key. Nice work. Here is where we can give our integration key a name. This can be helpful for future use if you need to do this again. Next we need to enable what scopes will be accessed by the key for bulk download. We need to select the following. Use a read agreement. Read, widget read and finally library read. With these four scopes enabled. We’re ready to click save. This will bring us to a list of access tokens we have created and their corresponding date. To access the key, we click on the key name and then click on Integration Key. This will bring up a dialog box where we can copy the key and then plug it into our command. Next we need to add the date range. We want the command to search within for documents. Make sure the date format is a four digit year, then a dash followed by a two digit month and another dash followed by a two digit day.

Just like we have in the past, we can copy the path name to the folder containing our download application and user text file from our File Explorer window and paste it here.

Now we need to point our command to the users. We want to download agreements from. To do this, we just need the name of the file we created with all of our user emails. Congratulations! We now have a finished command. Keep in mind that your command should be a single line, but I don’t want the text to be too small on your screen. So I’ve enlarged the text and separated some of the elements.

With our command written out, we can paste it into our command prompt and hit enter. Notice that we can see an update for each stage of the process, like how many users or how many agreements are currently being downloaded. This might take a little bit, depending on how many users and agreements need to process. We will come back once the download has successfully finished, and we will see an command prompt for the process has reached the done status.

All of the downloads are complete. All the documents are in subfolders named after the email address of the user, and if we click the folder, we can see folders containing the signed agreements and their order reports. Thanks for following along with me today. If you’d like to learn more about other ways to download agreements using the Adobe Acrobat Sign Dashboard or Rest APIs, check out the links and information on this page.