Implementing a Contact.sms api action

[Michael McAndrew]

Hey there,

Following on from http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,26374.0.html I am starting to implement a Contact.sms api action*

* as opposed to Phone.sms or Sms.send - I am open to being persuaded on that.

Do people have any thoughts on the method that this should wrap around?

My initial thoughts are CRM_Activity_BAO_Activity::sendSMS or ::sendSMSMessage

PS my investigations into http://drupal.org/project/smsframework and http://drupal.org/project/voipdrupal didn't turn up much useful.

[Michael McAndrew]

PS you can follow progress here: https://github.com/michaelmcandrew/org.thirdsectordesign.chainsms and if someone wants to tell me why when I enable that extension the api does not get registered, I would be grateful.

Code: [Select]

ubuntu@scratch:/projects/sms$ drush civicrm-api contact.sms
Array
(
    [is_error] => 1
    [error_message] => API (contact,sms) does not exist (join the API team and implement it!)
)


[totten]

It took me a minute, but I'm persuaded that a 'contact.sendSms' would make some sense. (Note: I don't think 'sms' is a verb.)

There are a few different APIs one might implement, but I think they'd have different meanings:

 * Contact.sendSms -- Send a message to particular person -- automatically figure out how to route the message (eg figure out which phone number makes sense and then compose the message) and create an activity record.
 * Activity.create (type==SMS) -- Record the fact that an SMS was sent. This might be used when importing a database of past SMS interactions from a third-party application.
 * Sms.send / Sms.receive -- Low-level SMS API for processing messages. These APIs would work in terms of phone#s rather than contact ID#s. If a downstream developer has some special logic for picking phone#s or creating activities, then he would use this instead of Contact.sendSms.

[Michael McAndrew]

Thanks for your thoughts, Tim

I don't think 'sms' is a verb

I wonder if sms is a verb in the same way that email is a verb. The API construction is 'entity action', 'noun verb' makes the meaning clearer.

Sms.send / Sms.receive

Could potentially / alternatively be Phone.sendSms and Phone.receiveSms.  I am also 'dreaming' about Phone.Call

[Michael McAndrew]

Re: my question about the extension api problem - Xavier thinks bug (

[7:10pm] xavier_: I think totten did mention the api wasn't part of the path if put in extension, but not sure if bug or fixed
[7:10pm] xavier_: I'd say bug, but didn't look at it

[Eileen]

Tim would know - but I thought this function was supposed to add your php dir to the path.

Code: [Select]

function _chainsms_civix_civicrm_config(&$config = NULL) {
  static $configured = FALSE;
  if ($configured) return;
  $configured = TRUE;

  $template =& CRM_Core_Smarty::singleton();

  $extRoot = dirname( __FILE__ ) . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR;
  $extDir = $extRoot . 'templates';

  if ( is_array( $template->template_dir ) ) {
      array_unshift( $template->template_dir, $extDir );
  } else {
      $template->template_dir = array( $extDir, $template->template_dir );
  }

  $include_path = $extRoot . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path( );
  set_include_path( $include_path );
}


There was some conversation on the api list about it - Nicholas G was going to take a look.

[totten]

Re: my question about the extension api problem - Xavier thinks bug (

[7:10pm] xavier_: I think totten did mention the api wasn't part of the path if put in extension, but not sure if bug or fixed
[7:10pm] xavier_: I'd say bug, but didn't look at it

If you're using civix, then the extension adds itself to the include_path using hook_civicrm_config, so you can call APIs that are provided by extensions.

There was a bug with the API's introspection -- eg when using the API explorer to list available API entities+actions, it would only display actions that were in the main 'modules/civicrm/api/v3' folder. A patch was committed (for 4.2 IIRC) that allowed introspection to work better with other code.

[Michael McAndrew]

There was a bug with the API's introspection -- eg when using the API explorer to list available API entities+actions, it would only display actions that were in the main 'modules/civicrm/api/v3' folder. A patch was committed (for 4.2 IIRC) that allowed introspection to work better with other code.

OK - this was a capitalisation issue.  When generating api files, Civix should capitalise stuff - will submit issue on github.

[Michael McAndrew]

so https://github.com/michaelmcandrew/org.thirdsectordesign.chainsms now implements a new api action for Contacts contact.sms which takes a 'text' parameter which uses token subsitution. e.g.

Code: [Select]

$results=civicrm_api("Contact","sms", array (version => '3', 'id' =>'1', 'text' =>'{contact.first_name} is a {contact.job_title} at {contact.current_employer}'));

[xavier]

Hi michael,

could you push the api in the core?

X+