Home
All Blogs
How to Deliver an Entire Contract Workflow in Your Web Application. No Third Parties Required
Laura Massingham
Director of Product Marketing
Published March 17, 2026
Updated March 17, 2026
3 min
How to Deliver an Entire Contract Workflow in Your Web Application. No Third Parties Required
Laura Massingham
Director of Product Marketing
Summary: This blog discusses how to reduce the cost of third-party applications, maintain security and version control, and reduce context switching for your users with a single developer toolkit: Apryse WebViewer.
Behind every deal, partnership, and policy is a contract. From NDAs and sales agreements to vendor onboarding and internal compliance. They’re essential for keeping operations moving, but they also contain highly sensitive data, involve complex documentation requirements, and follow unique workflows across teams. Supporting all of that often means stitching together multiple third-party tools for authoring, collaboration, approvals, and signing. The cost of those tools and the constant context switching for users is pushing developers to rethink how contracts are created, reviewed, and signed directly inside their business applications.
In many organizations today, users download a contract template, edit it offline, email it to stakeholders for feedback, then upload revisions back into a CRM or other business application. Each step introduces risk: sensitive data leaves the platform, version control gets messy, and approvals slow down.
Modern teams who value productivity and want to control costs, especially those building solutions in systems like Salesforce, Appian, or custom internal apps, need a better way. They want contract workflows that:
- Keep users inside one trusted application
- Prevent external downloads and data exposure
- Enable collaboration, comments, and redlining
- Support data population from business records
- Include approval routing and legally binding digital signatures
Embedding contract generation directly into the app solves these challenges, delivering a faster, more secure experience for both users and administrators.
What We Built: End-to-End Contract Lifecycle with WebViewer
To demonstrate what’s possible with the Apryse toolkit, our team built an end-to-end contract workflow using WebViewer, our client-side, JavaScript SDK. The demo showcases how developers can bring contract creation, review, and signing into any web-based workflow quickly and securely.
In this video, we demonstrate a workflow that includes:
Contract Authoring & Collaboration
- Load a DOCX contract template directly in WebViewer
- Live editing and redlining for collaborative changes
- Comments and track changes to streamline review cycles
Population of Templates with Real Data
- Auto-fill placeholders using structured JSON data
- Monitor updates/changes inside WebViewer
- Convert the completed DOCX into a final PDF contract
In-App Contract Signing
- Enable secure eSignature directly in the viewer
- No need to export, email, or download files
- The sample document powering this demo: a standard NDA.
Why WebViewer: Developer Advantages for Embedded Contracts
Requirements | How WebViewer Supports It |
|---|---|
Embedded authoring within CRM, automation platform, or custom app | Runs entirely in-browser. No MS Office or plugins are required. Author the contract in DOCX, upload branded templates, and convert to PDF for distribution. |
Redlining and comments for legal teams | WebViewer supports editing, track-changes, annotation, and version history for DOCX, PDF, and spreadsheets. |
Approval and signing in-app | Digital signatures, time-stamp validation, audit logs, role-based viewer configuration. |
Security + compliance | No external uploads; it’s deployable on-prem or in secure cloud, audit trails, and version control. |
Accessible and customizable UI | The UI is modular, customizable, and accessible. Customize the viewer to fit the branding and user experience you want. You can also choose the controls, permissions, style, and more. |
Additional capabilities available, but not mentioned in the video, include:
- Page manipulation: Merge terms and conditions, split, reorder, and delete pages to organize final contract files for distribution.
- Document archiving: Convert final, signed contract to PDF/A, and compress for long term storage in compliance with regulatory requirements.
- Redact sensitive data: Permanently delete sensitive data from PDFs, images, and Microsoft Office files.
- Search: Use advanced regex to search across contract pages. Find the exact position of text on pages and highlight all matches in your browser.
Developers usually have to stitch together multiple external services to support the demonstrated contract lifecycle: Word editors, PDF converters, email-based signing tools. All of these introduce security risk, context switching, and compliance gaps.
With WebViewer, contracts stay entirely within your application from creation to signature. Developers can enforce role-based access, control lifecycle logic, and trigger downstream automation with a single, well-documented, and trusted toolkit.
To learn more about Apryse WebViewer, check out the interactive demo or reach out to sales. To access sample code for this application, head over to our GitHub page.
