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

Patrick DeCarl1 · ‎06-07-2018

This is solved OOTB by using notify workflow activity "Input". Example below is what I have used.

rohanreddy · ‎11-02-2018

When I am trying to use the Notify call activity in Workflow. It is continuously calling the number. So, can you please provide me the script you used in the call activity to fetch the phone numbers of the users

andy_dufresne · ‎10-25-2018

Great question,

Me too interested to know if its possibile to read anything from a record, that would be ... lets say 'brillian'.

ServiceNow folks, any good news for us?

Thanks for reading,

Andy!