The Download URL is empty

Reasons why the download URL can be empty

The Document’s status is "draft"

If you did not specify a status attribute when creating your Document, its status will be set to draft by default.

The Document’s status is "pending" or "generating"

If you specified the pending status when creating your Document, it has been queued for generation. Its status can be either pending or generating when you receive the response to your creating request.

You need to fetch the Document again in a loop until its status becomes success or failure, or use a webhook endpoint to react to its generation.

The Document’s status is "failure"

If the Document’s generation failed, its status will be set to failure and its download URL will be null.

You can retry generating the Document by setting its status back to pending.

Alternative: Switch to the "sync" workflow

If you really need to get the download URL right in the Document’s creation response you can use our sync generation endpoint.

A word on the preview URL attribute

Don't use preview_url

The preview_url attribute is not a download URL. Its only purpose is to show a preview of the Document (hence the "preview" in its name). This is useful if you want to show a draft version of the Document before you actually generate it.

A good example of using preview_url is PDFMonkey's dashboard itself. When you create a Document, it starts as a draft you can preview. You can change the Document data as many times as you want until you're ready to generate it. The preview on the right is what's returned by preview_url.