All the examples I saw showing how to build up a DocuSign envelope (using Java in my case) use a Base64 encoded String to send the file(s) content.
That means loading the entire file into memory.
Is there a way to send files to the DocuSign API without loading them entirely into memory?
Document document = new Document();
document.setDocumentBase64(docBase64);
...
An excellent question.
Is there a way to send files to the DocuSign API without loading them entirely into memory?
Yes. You can send the documents in binary form by sending the API request using the multi-part mime format. The SDKs don't support this currently, so you will also need to hand-roll the JSON. But none of this is very hard.
We have examples for all of our major languages. They are workflow number 10 within each of the eg-03 code example repositories on github.com/docusign
Here is workflow number 10 for Java: EG010ControllerSendBinaryDocs.java