Get the ANI inside the first HTTP request to server

[stougard]

Hi,

To get session and ANI information inside a request, I just add this

<submit namelist="session.telephone.ani $name session.telephone.dnis session.id" ...

It works fine.

However, I need to know the ANI number from the very first request to the HTTP server, before the server returns any XML, it should know already the ANI.

Is there any way to activate the sending of those variable in all request by default (including very first one) ?

I've checked, some VoiceXML servers do that, why not here ?

Kind regards

Stephane
Transfer-To

[support]

Hi Stephane,

The IVR platform needs to run a script in order to get the ANI number in a way that would be meaningful. At the bare minimum, you would have to run 1 script that calls on the session.telephone.ani. To help us understand, why do you need the ANI for the very first request?

Regards,
Plum Support

[pixlpete]

I was about to ask the very same question today. The reason one would want to know the session.telephone.ani before any VXML is loaded is that, at least in our case, we want to automatically load data by looking up records by the caller's phone number. The way it is, there is no way to accomplish this without doing another round trip to the web server which is not efficient. Clearly, the platform already has the caller id since it is coming from the telephony side. I can only speak to our specific needs but it seems like it would be fairly straight forward to append this to the query string configured for the phone number. I am about to start coding the twice as expensive as it needs to be work around, but I sure don't like doing it. The original poster is correct, other IVR platforms DO include this in the initial fetch for this very reason. In our case we are talking about additional hundreds of thousands of web requests per month to work around this limitation.

[support]

Hi,

While this isn't necessarily a scalable solution, you could set up a scratchpad to collect the ANI, and then send it along to the script on your web server. That way, you'd only be hitting your server once.

We will add this to our list of feature requests for the platform, but we'd like to get some clarification from you. Would it be sufficient if the ANI optionally appeared as an HTTP POST?

Regards,
Plum Support

[pixlpete]

Yes, ANI as a form field as opposed to adding it to the query string would be fine. I just thought that since the request is already a GET, it would be simpler (and perhaps easier to deal with for others) if the request was not a mix of query string and form fields, but that would certainly work for us. I can't see the "scratch pad" idea working for us in production, way too "fussy" configuration for each phone number, of which we will have many (eventually hundreds). I will forward the request to our sales contact at PlumVoice to see if we might get more traction from that angle. This is kind of a big deal for us but I realize it isn't something you can just add right away.

[support]

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback. We understand that the scratchpad solution isn't very elegant and is not totally suitable for production. This request has been added to our internal feature requests list. We will advise as updates become available concerning this issue.

Regards,
Plum Support

[stougard]

Hi,

While this isn't necessarily a scalable solution, you could set up a scratchpad to collect the ANI, and then send it along to the script on your web server. That way, you'd only be hitting your server once.

We will add this to our list of feature requests for the platform, but we'd like to get some clarification from you. Would it be sufficient if the ANI optionally appeared as an HTTP POST?

Regards,
Plum Support

Hi,

I was asking this, because we intend to associate the ANI with the language used to answer so that the user directly get his own language with no selection process for each call (he select the language only at the very first call).

I think you should just add it in POST or GET from the very first request (the called number would be great as well and even the session number for the exact same reason). You can make as an option in the configuration of the application, but I really hardly see what it costs to add it in any request (one of your competitor includes those 3 information by default in any request).

Thanks a lot for your support.

Kind regards

Stephane
TransferTo

[support]

Hi Stephane,

Thank you for your feedback. We'll take this into consideration as part of the feature request for this functionality.

Regards,
Plum Support