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

Ben Vargas · ‎03-31-2017

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.

Ben Vargas · ‎04-07-2017

The HI Support INC has made it's way through Support and up to the dev team who advised that this is a platform limitation and would require an enhancement request... we will simply have to offer a generic "wake-up call" that a user has an SMS they need to respond to, but not actually gather accept/reject via the phone call.

Definitely unfortunate, these java libraries should be developed with similar capabilities... as of now Notify can't quite compete with PagerDuty or xMatters in terms of call processing/smarts as even though we have workflow control on calls, there is no link to the task that created it.

Details on the case...

We reviewed your use case with the on-call development team and they have provided us the answers . That is , 'call' activity definition in the workflow which creates notify_call record in the java layer does not have source column field defined . So , it is not populated . This seems to be an product enhancement .

I am still checking with the notify team if there is any workaround . I will update you , as soon as i hear from them .

On - Call Schedule Dev team's reply :

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Firstly "notify_call" table doesn't have the column "source" to point back to the task that created this call record.

seems like the issue is not with the on-call workflow but the activity it is using "Call Escalatee" which internally using the Activity definition "call".

on-call workflow is just using the "call" activity definition to initiate the call which internally creates notify_call records.

upon digging into the source code found that in NotifyDatabase.java

addMessageRecord() - is used to create notify_message records and have "source" as a parameter.

addCallRecord() - is used to create notify_call records and doesn't have any "source" as a parameter.

I don't think issue is with the workflow but with the activity definition.

View solution in original post

ashwinkumar_pat · ‎03-31-2017

Ummm...I was particularly interested in <client table> which unfortunately is empty. What is that sys id? is that the sys id of the notify_call record itself?

We may have to change the direction of thinking and divert it to customizing call activity. Do you know if notify.call() has any return value?

ashwinkumar_pat · ‎03-31-2017

it returns void

ashwinkumar_pat · ‎03-31-2017

Time for a hack?

Here is what we can try...

Delete the Call activity from the workflow and invoke the outgoing call workflow as a subflow

Ben Vargas · ‎03-31-2017

I think the challenge with deleting the Call workflow activity and calling the Outbound call workflow directly is that no call will be established, the SNC.Notify().call() is integral to getting the twilio API invoked through Notify; it actually connects the call and then the "Outbound call workflow" is just the "now that the user is on the line - what does servicenow do/say to the user" type workflow.

ashwinkumar_pat · ‎03-31-2017

Yeah your are right.

I am running out of options now

How I wish I had access to the code of SNC.Notify().call() function !

My last option would be to submit a bug/enhancement request to ServiceNow.

Sorry I couldn't help you