Notify Outbound Calls Through Twilio - Identify the Originating Task from Call Workflow/Record?

[Ben Vargas]

I am looking to enhance the ServiceNow "On-Call: Assign by Acknowledgement" workflow to also support calling the on-call individual's sms phone if they've so opted in their profile; the thought being it would read them the task short description and then prompt "1 to acknowledge or 2 to reject".

I have used the "Call" Workflow Activity provided by Notify and the workflow does trigger a call to the on-call's phone and successfully says "Hello World" via the workflow triggered by the 'Outgoing call workflow' on the number group. It appears that while the workflow runs, the notify_call record corresponding to the call is what is in scope as current, but there is no "source" field as there is with notify messages (notify_message).

So, has anyone solved for how to determine (and use data from) the task record from which the call was triggered? Right now I see no way of reading the contents of the task that triggered the call, or even knowing which task to acknowledge or reject when prompting the user for input.

[ashwinkumar_pat]

Hello Ben

If I understood your question right, what you are trying to achieve is read the field values of task record and include those in your message.

The workflow "On-Call: Assign by Acknowledgement" runs on Task table and you should be able to use current.<field id> (e.g. current.short_description) in this workflow and pass it as input to "outgoing call workflow" and use it in Say

Here is the doc on workflow variables - Using variables in a workflow

and here is a relevant post - How to pass values from a from to a workflow that is inside another workflow

Hope that helps. The use case is very interesting. Please let me know how it all goes and would appreciate if you could do a doc or a video on this use case.

~@$h

[Ben Vargas]

Thanks for the response Ashwinkumar - The challenge is that when the Call Workflow Activity is invoked, it engages the SNC.Notify() library which is responsible for establishing the call with twilio (and creating the notify_call record). When the call is established, it runs the workflow defined on the Notify Number Group's "Outgoing call workflow". Therefore, the workflow being run is not the On-Call: Assign by Acknowledgement when the call is running; that is the one that triggered the call, but the other workflow attached to notify_call is what is running the say and input workflow activities to manage the call.

I don't see anywhere to "pass" the data I need to the SNC.Notify().call() method used by the Call workflow activity... do you have ideas on how to do that? The Call workflow activity doesn't directly call a workflow, so that's my challenge.

[ashwinkumar_pat]

Hello Ben

I dont have any records in notify_call table. Can you please do me a favor by attaching a sample record here including all the fields?

I am guessing the record in notify_call table may have a reference to base record against which notify.call() was issued.

[Ben Vargas]

Yeah, that's what I was hoping for too... similarly to how notify_message (for SMS messages) has a source field. The notify_call table does not... here's an xml with of one of the records (with numbers changed for privacy):

<xml>
<notify_call>
<active>false</active>
<calculated_name>+185838081111/calculated_name>
<call_id>CA73f37c2ad3e2d06c17d2df08d70cfd0b</call_id>
<client/>
<client_table/>
<direction>outbound</direction>
<is_human>true</is_human>
<last_action>
{"fClassName":"NotifyAction","fActions":[{"type":"SayAction","properties":{"fClassName":"SayAction","fLanguage":"en-US","fText":"Hello World!"}}]}
</last_action>
<notify_number display_value="+15039858999">01117e4f6f08320cdd3deec54b3ee4e8</notify_number>
<parent_call/>
<phone_number>+185838081111</phone_number>
<sys_created_by>system</sys_created_by>
<sys_created_on>2017-03-30 22:17:25</sys_created_on>
<sys_id>09fa12cedbf53600faca720ebf9619f4</sys_id>
<sys_mod_count>2</sys_mod_count>
<sys_updated_by>guest</sys_updated_by>
<sys_updated_on>2017-03-30 22:17:38</sys_updated_on>
<type>phone</type>
</notify_call>
</xml>