Tropo CallBox

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A lot of apartment buildings have callboxes that will dial a tenant and allow the tenant to open the door by pressing a key sequence. I have had to use this to call myself before when I left my keys upstairs, or that time I lost my keys for a week (but thats another story). So what happens if you don’t have your phone or your keys? Or what about when you have guests that arrive early and you’re still in the shower, getting ready or can’t get to your phone in time?

In this example, the callbox dials Tropo instead of your phone, uses the built-in IVR to ask for a password. If the password is correct, it dials the dtmf digits to open the door and sends a text message to your phone alerting you of company.

var
result = ask(“The password is?”, {
choices: “sausages”
});
if(result.value == “sausages”){
say(“that is correct”);
say(“https://evolution.voxeo.com/library/audio/prompts/dtmf/Dtmf-9.wav”);
message(“A Guest has Arrived”, {
to:”+19192223323″,
network:”SMS”
});
}
else{
say(“there is a nice bench outside for you to sleep on”);
}

CUCM UDS API

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Anyone who has deployed Jabber knows of the cisco-uds SRV record that Jabber uses (or Expressway-C in the case of MRA) to discover it’s services. It’s also used for directory searches, and home cluster lookup with ILS.

UDS or User Data Services is a simple REST based API for CUCM. While the UDS API is not as extensive as what you can do with AXL through SOAP and WSDL, it makes a great use case for a front end to allow end users to manage their own devices: Change their single number reach destination, password, speed dials, and conference pins.

For security reasons, most browsers will block an XMLHttpRequest served on one page and originating on another (in the case of a front end making UDS calls to CUCM). To get around this, you would use CORS or Cross Origin Resource Sharing, defining the front end URL inside CUCM.

UDS supports REST queries POST/PUT/GET/DELETE in XML format. Some calls do not require authentication and some do. Ones that do will use Basic authentication built into the browser which encodes the username:password in Base64 format.

UDS resources that do not require authentication
clusterUser, installedLocales, models, options, phoneService(s), servers, timezones, users, version

GET https://{host}:8443/cucm-uds/users?last=Smit
GET https://{host}:8443/cucm-uds/clusterUser?username={userId}

UDS resources that require authentication
credentials, device(s), extension(s), remoteDestination(s), speedDial(s), subscribedService(s), user, userPolicy

POST https:­//{host}:8443/cucm-uds/user/{userId}/speedDials
<!–add speedDials example request body–>
<speedDials>
<speedDial>
<index>1</index>
<number>1234567890</number>
<label>Manager</label>
</speedDial>
<speedDial>
<index>2</index>
<number>1234567899</number>
<label>Assistant</label>
</speedDial>
</speedDials>

CUCM UDS API Reference
CUCM UDS Developer Guide
CUCM UDS Authentication Guide
Base64 Encoder/Decoder

REST API and the IoT (Internet of Things)

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You’ve probably heard a lot of buzzwords lately: API, JSON, and REST among them, however truth be told, REST or Representational State Transfer has always been around as the “language of the internet” (a REST HTTP GET brought you this page!), so it goes without saying that in the age of Internet of Things, REST would become infinitely more important.

REST is made up of 4 things

URI: https://api.ciscospark.com/v1/rooms
Request Type: POST, GET, PUT, etc
Header: Authorization (API key), Content-Type (html, application/xml, application/json)
Body: { “function” : “sendMessage”, “message” : “this is a message”}

JSON is the preferred format over XML because its more efficient. With PHP methods json_encode() and json_decode() for instance, it’s very easy to parse arrays into JSON format and vis a visa.

One of the great things about REST is that when a call is made, it sends a response, which can then in turn be a variable in a second response and so on. It’s not client-server, it’s a conversation.

rest-api

Check out my demo’s for Spark API and Tropo API for a full writeup of how to write some simple REST calls using an html form and some PHP.