Voxeo Developers Corner

Lately, the Voxeo Designer platform has become increasingly popular. However, it can be somewhat limited in terms of call control. Customers who are used to a combination of CCXML and VoiceXML may be turned away by this idea. Well, fear not, as we can easily integrate CCXML and Designer now, adding that game-changing call control aspect that CCXML brings to the table. Why use a CCXML front end, you say? Well, lots of reasons. CCXML brings call control, conferencing, whisper dialogs, hold dialogs, as well as the ability to pass in parameters to your Designer application. Whether it’s “you have a call from John Smith, press 1 to accept this call,” or a simple repeating hold music dialog, it is now possible with Designer dialogs.

So now let’s take a look at how we put it all together. Let’s assume that you already have a basic Designer application established. At this point, we don’t care what it does. Now, we need to write a CCXML front end for it.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ccxml version="1.0" xmlns:voxeo="http://community.voxeo.com/xmlns/ccxml">
  <var name="myDialogID"/>
  <eventprocessor>

    <transition event="connection.alerting">
      <log expr="'Preparing to answer the call.'"/>
      <accept/>
    </transition>

    <transition event="connection.connected">
      <log expr="'Caller has connected.  Executing VoiceXML dialog now.'"/>
      <dialogstart src="'helloworld.vxml'" type="'application/voicexml+xml'" dialogid="myDialogID"/>
    </transition>

    <transition event="dialog.exit">
      <log expr="'The dialog is now complete.  Exiting application.'"/>
      <exit/>
    </transition>

    <transition event="error.*">
      <log expr="'An error has occured (' + event$.reason + ').  Exiting application.'"/>
      <exit/>
    </transition>

  </eventprocessor>
</ccxml>

This simple CCXML code snippet accept a user’s call, and launches a VoiceXML dialog titled helloworld.vxml. Now, all we need to do is modify the “src” attribute to reference the Designer application. How, you ask? Well, it’s a little tricky, but far from impossible. All we need to do is grab the Designer URL from the Application Debugger (or the Prophecy Log Viewer, for all the local installations out there). The full URLs will look something like this, and may require copying the link to the clipboard (in Evolution, at least) in order to see the entire thing:

Evolution Designer:

  http://evodesigner-internal.voxeo.com/CallRouter?vr.application.id=XXXX   (where XXXX is your specific Application ID)

Prophecy Designer:

  http://127.0.0.1:9992/CallRouter?vr.application.id=X   (where X is your specific Application ID)

We can then inject this into the <dialogstart> keeping everything else the same. The dialog “type” remains “application/voicexml+xml” since Designer is pure VoiceXML behind the scenes, coupled with a custom GUI.

Now let’s take a look at the finalized code, with our Designer dialog in place.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<ccxml version="1.0" xmlns:voxeo="http://community.voxeo.com/xmlns/ccxml">
  <var name="myDialogID"/>
  <eventprocessor>

    <transition event="connection.alerting">
      <log expr="'Preparing to answer the call.'"/>
      <accept/>
    </transition>

    <transition event="connection.connected">
      <log expr="'Caller has connected.  Executing Designer dialog now.'"/>
      <dialogstart src="'http://127.0.0.1:9992/CallRouter?vr.application.id=1'" type="'application/voicexml+xml'" dialogid="myDialogID"/>
    </transition>

    <transition event="dialog.exit">
      <log expr="'The dialog is now complete.  Exiting application.'"/>
      <exit/>
    </transition>

    <transition event="error.*">
      <log expr="'An error has occured (' + event$.reason + ').  Exiting application.'"/>
      <exit/>
    </transition>

  </eventprocessor>
</ccxml>

And there you have it — a basic application which launches a Designer dialog. Hopefully this will help shed some light on how developers can combine the utility of CCXML with the usability of Voxeo Designer.

Jeff Menkel VXML Certified Developer