Templates

A template is a reusable design — a background image plus a set of editable hotspots — built visually in the dashboard’s Template Studio. Once built, you render it over and over by sending different values, without re-describing the layout every time.

This is the recommended way to integrate Drawtab for most use cases (event passes, certificates, social cards): design once in the dashboard, then call the API with just the per-recipient data.

Hotspots and variables

Each editable region on a template — a name field, a photo, a QR code — is a hotspot. When you render with templateId + variables, each hotspot’s value is looked up from variables by, in order of preference:

The hotspot’s variableKey (set explicitly in the Template Studio)
The hotspot’s label
The hotspot’s type

If none of those keys are present in variables, the hotspot’s configured default value is used instead — so a render call can omit variables for hotspots you want to leave at their defaults.


{
  "templateId": "68f1a2b3c4d5e6f7a8b9",
  "variables": {
    "name": "Sarah Chen",
    "role": "Keynote Speaker",
    "photo": "https://example.com/sarah.jpg"
  }
}

Check a template’s hotspot keys in the Template Studio before wiring up an integration — the variable key shown there is exactly what your variables object’s keys need to match.

Hotspot types

Type	What you pass in `variables`
Text	A string
Image / photo	An image URL
QR code	The value to encode (a URL, plain text, etc.)

Text hotspots carry their own font, size, color, and alignment settings configured in the Template Studio — you only supply the text content, not the styling, at render time.

Ownership

A template belongs to the workspace it was created in. An API key can only render templates that belong to its own workspace — a templateId from another workspace (or one that doesn’t exist) returns 404, the same as a nonexistent one, so response codes can’t be used to enumerate other workspaces’ template IDs.

When to use a custom canvas instead

If your use case doesn’t fit a fixed template — fully dynamic layouts, a one-off graphic, programmatically-generated positioning — describe the image directly with canvas + layers instead. See POST /v1/render and Layer Types.