Discover in our video how to configure a mobile upload in ABBYY Vantage.
Hello. Today I’d like to show you how we configure a mobile upload within ABBYY Vantage. Now this is a pretty cool feature. It gives us the ability to allow an end user to use their phone to provide documents into the solution. And this is going to be a technical video today where we explain how to set up this process.
The one thing that I want to bring your attention to very quickly here is the Vantage Help section where we refer to as “Uploading documents from a mobile device”. There are a lot of features built into this platform to customize this experience and therefore I just want to make sure that you are aware of how to find this. And this is just simply done with Vantage. Under the help section and the documentation.
Within this section, there’s also a link to the Swagger API, where you can find all of the calls that are supported within Vantage. Now, the reason I mention that is because the idea of uploading documents through a mobile device has to be secure. And one of the ways that happens is that Vantage gives us the ability to ask the API call for a token and a mobile experience link. And that’s essentially what we’re doing here as we go into the Vantage API.
So allow me to show you how that works. And the way I’m going to show you is by asking the API to provide us a mobile upload link. And this mobile upload link is secure. Also, it’s a timed mobile upload link. So it lasts for a period of time and then it expires. And that’s obviously for security purposes. So we’re in the Swagger page and we’re under transactions. The way that we initiate this mobile upload link and we ask Vantage to provide that to us is we go to our transactions and we say, “Hey, let’s try it out”.
So let me give you an example of how this is done. Obviously we’re going to have to provide it a skill id. And then of course we want to make sure that this generate mobile input link is set to true. That parameter being set to true is what’s going to ask Vantage to create the transaction and as part of the response, give us the mobile input link. So I’m going to go ahead and execute that. When I do, what you’ll see here is a response where I get a specific transaction Id. Also, I do get a mobile input link.
So what I’m going to do here is I’m going to copy that link into my clipboard. And there’s a couple of things. I’m going to open up a new notepad here. What I’d like to show you is a couple of things that we get when we get this link. Let me get rid of some of the noise here real quick. There are several different pieces of this URL. First off, we have some query strings that are very, very important. We have a query string called md. This is the mode of the mobile capture experience, and I’ll explain more about that in a second. We have the token of the mobile capture experience and specifically the token of how we’re going to provide this to the end user. And then of course we have a version. So there’s several different pieces of this URL. As you’ll read in the documentation, we can customize the mobile experience. And the way that we do that is we modify this MD query string. And there are a couple of ways we can do it.
In short, we can provide it some JSON and I have some example JSON here that shows us how we could do this. So in this sample JSON, we’re asking for a passport and we’re asking for a proof of residency where we’re asking the user to make a choice of what kind of document. Is it a rental agreement or a utility bill? So what I’m going to do is I’m going to copy that. Now, if I go back over into our query string, this is actually going to get overwritten with the JSON. However, before we do that, we must URL encode this JSON. I’m going to go ahead and do that here on my other screen. And you can use any third party URL encoder for JSON.
So once you do that and you copy it, you take your JSON, you get that URL encoded right here is where you would paste it. What we have here is our transaction information. That’s our transaction id. This is the mode which explains the JSON, which once again changes the user interface that we’re going to prompt Vantage for. The token and the version here. So what I’m going to do is simply correct my URL now that I have it all separated and I will show you here the mobile experience.
So now I have the mobile experience in front of me. Essentially what I’ve done is that URL that we just built, I’ve provided to my mobile device. And what we’re going to do here is simply open that from here.
Now once we load this experience, you can see here I have what we’re asking for as a passport and a proof of residence. This is customized from that JSON that we URL encoded. So that’s where the software realizes what I need to ask for here. So I’m going to simply capture a couple of documents and show you this awesome user experience.
This gives us the ability to ask for a document without having to have an app on our phone. The user does not have to download an app or have an app pre-installed on their phone. We’re simply just asking them to open this experience.
Here’s an example where I just did a passport, and when we come to the proof of residency, we have the ability to ask for a utility bill or a rental agreement. So today I’m going to go ahead and select a utility bill. And you can see here I have a utility bill in front of me so we can auto capture that. And this experience actually, I’m asking for two utility bills, so I’m going to use the same exact document here. You can see as I hover over the document, the software will look for the borders here and capture that document for us. A pretty cool experience here. And then of course when we’re done, we can click the upload button. And what that does is it gives us the ability to pass that information to the specific transaction in Vantage securely and confidently. So that’s the experience here of how we make this mobile upload process happen technically. From the end user perspective, you can see it’s simple. They just get a link that we would provide and then of course we open up this beautiful photo capture experience for them.
So let me summarize because this is pretty technical and I want to make sure that we’re very clear on how this is done. So the first thing we do is we ask Vantage to create a transaction and provide us a mobile link that we’re going to provide the end user. We have the ability to customize that mobile link with different parameters in the JSON. So if you remember, we have a transaction, we have a mode, we have a token, and we have a version. So those were our different query strings that we have the ability to modify. We have JSON, and this is all very well documented in the documentation. We have JSON that we provide to the experience that must be URL encoded. And that’s how the app, when the user sees it, knows what to ask for. So am I asking for a passport or a proof of residency or a driver’s license? And how many of those documents do we really need? That’s where the intelligence of the application comes from. And of course, we have our token here on how we’re going to access our software and give it to the ability to make sure we’re already authorized to use it.
So a very cool experience, very customizable, very configurable to make sure that your end users and your customer experience is top notch.
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