What can I do if the SDK does not work

The other day, colleague asked me to help him because he had trouble using Docusign SDK. He was trying for hours to add a document to an existing envelope and the server kept returning an error about a missing HTTP header.

We checked his code and the documentation together without finding how to pass missing data.

So I was like: "well, that's simple: the SDK does not implement the API correctly."

My young colleague was surprised: "but this is a big company and this is the officially supported SDK,it doesn't make any sense!"

Checking SDK's source code and issues in Github confirmed that: the implementation of the API has been incomplete for years.

What is the correct behaviour to have in this situation. It can be a SDK or a popular lib that doesn't behave as it should for your operation.

• Don't panic.
• Check official examples if they exist. You'll know if you are missing something. Very often, documentation are unclear, incomplete or out of date.
• If the piece of software is open source, that's great, you'll have all the information you need. Have a look at the unresolved issues and take some time to explore the source code.

This is the point of this post. Don't be afraid to look at the source code of the dependencies you use in your code.

• You'll ensure that the code fits your needs,
• In general, the maintainers are not smarter than you. They make mistakes and have more important tasks to do (usually, their paid job) rather than fixing them,
• You might learn something relevant.

In this situation the advice was to call the API directly using resquests rather than using the SDK. It's sometimes easier to work at a lower level.