Regular readers will know that a fairly long time ago, we investigated the Signature Control. As it is one of the few controls that has no extension capability other than styling, we had a few challenges. We were of course able to play a little with the look and feel, and we even managed to make it more responsive.

But the overall experience left us quite unsatisfied. After all, there are some things that we wanted to do with the Signature Control that we simply could not achieve, notably it is not possible to Save the Signature and Re-Load it – that is because the only way to get the signature out of the interview is either as an attachment or as a signature in a Form. Which messes up any process where the agent has to be able to see the signature but does not want to have to open a PDF or an attachment.

So this week we went back to the drawing board and reinvented the Signature Control. We used the jQuery UI Signature from Keith Wood, an excellent component that can be happily embedded into our interviews using the Extension API.

We aimed to deliver on the following elements, and this component gave us everything we needed and more

• Customizable colours, guideline and so on (over and above what the standard control gives)
• Save the output as JSON, SVG or PNG
• Save the output to an Oracle Intelligent Advisor attribute for reloading later
• Output the signature as an image in BI Publisher (Analytics Desktop)
• Redraw the signature from the saved data

The Signature Control we created delivers on all of these. It uses the JavaScript Extension API to create an Input Control (“customInput”) which means it can be tied to an attribute unlike the standard signature.

The jQuery UI plugin gives us plenty of options for the Signature Control, colours and guidelines as well as saving and clearing and redrawing the control. That opens up a lot of cool ideas, of which more later!

The signature attribute can be used in Analytics Publisher using the same method as a standard signature or image.

We’ve added this control extension to the signature extension product in the Online Store, and here is the video showing off the new control.