Click to call from an iFrame

[George Thomas]

I have a 3rd party website embedded into Cisco Finesse as a gadget. This website has phone numbers on it, is it possible to provide click to call functionality from within this webapp gadget?

[dekwan]

Hi George,

I have never tried out this use case, so my suggestions/comments are theoretical.

The only way I can think of is by modifying this 3rd party website where when the phone number is clicked, it will call the Finesse REST API to make a call. The only problem would be that the site would not know if the call was successful since you cannot get the dialog notifications to determine the outcome, but the user would know because their call control gadget would show it dialing out and connect or fail.

I am not aware of any way for an embedded webpage to send data into the gadget itself so that the gadget can handle the call.

Maybe others can chime in if they have attempted this use case.

Thanx,

Denise

[George Thomas]

Thanks Denise. Does that mean the webpage that is configured as a gadget cannot communicate to the Callcontrol gadget?

[dekwan]

I am not sure I fully understand your question, but I will make my best attempt to answer what I think you are asking, so correct me if I'm wrong.

If the webpage executes the Make Call API, the call control gadget listens to all of the events and will get a dialog event if the call was successful or a failure if the call was not. The call control gadget will reflect accordingly. But, the webpage cannot communicate directly to the call control gadget. What I mean is that you will not see the dial pad being opened and the phone number being typed when the webpage calls this API.

I hope I understood you correctly. Like I said, if I didn't, please clarify.

Thanx,

Denise

[George Thomas]

Got it, but I wanted to make sure I explained my scenario correctly. I have a webpage with a bunch of phone numbers and this webpage is embedded in Finesse as a gadget (I used Embeddedwebapp gadget provided by Cisco to achieve this). Is it not possible to right click a number from within this webpage (that is configured as a FInesse gadget) and call out using the Finesse app?

[dekwan · Accepted solution]

Understood. I am not aware of a way to send data (the phone number) from within a webpage in an iframe (the Embedded Web app) to make the call with the Finesse desktop. As you are probably already aware, the Finesse gadget is just displaying the webpage within an iframe and therefore cannot communicate from within this webpage.

Now, if this webpage had an API that the Finesse gadget can call to get this list of phone numbers, you can create a custom gadget that lists out the numbers in some sort of table and build in this click to call feature. This method would not be using the webpage at all.

Thanx,

Denise

[George Thomas]

Thanks Denise! That helps! We are replacing CAD for a customer and they used the Click to dial functionality from within the app to call out from the same website and was wondering if this is something that can be replicated in Finesse. It looks like, its not an easy option.

[jpm1]

Hi Denise,

I know this is an old thread, but I am running into the exact same scenario and was hoping that perhaps something has changed that might make this more of a possibility. Currently I am also displaying a web page in an iFrame with the EmbeddedWebApp Gadget. We had done some prior customization to this data and it is currently set up so that if you click the phone number within the web page it takes you to the Cisco Web Dialer login page on CUCM, where the agent logs in one time and then the calls go through CUCM by clicking on it after the login. This was done before we started investigating UCCX as an option. Since we are already making the Web Dialer API call could this be switched to Finesse? I think if we left it in this state, we would probably lose some statistics since we would be bypassing UCCX for CUCM via the embedded web page. 

Thank you in advance for your time and insight.

[dekwan]

Hi,

Where are you currently making the Web Dialer API call? Is it within the website backend? Or is it in the gadget itself?

Thanx,

Denise

[jpm1]

Hi Denise,

Through the website backend. That's why I thought there might be a possibility of changing that to connect with the Finesse API instead.

Thank you!

Jason

[dekwan]

Hi,

If you are doing it through the website's backend, the answer is yes and no. And here is why...

The Finesse REST APIs (for make call) are asynchronous so a complete make call would mean to make the REST request, then wait for a notification via the Finesse notification service to come back to confirm that the make call was successful as well as the call information. The problem is that the Finesse notification service only supports 1 login per user and that includes the connection via the Finesse out of the box desktop. So, since your agents are logged into the Finesse out of the box desktop, you cannot create that second connection from your website's backend.

Now, is there a way around it? Yes, but its not the best way. You can do the make call request via the REST API, then do a poll on the user's list of dialogs via a GET REST API to see if a new call appears to know if it was successful or if it failed. Of course, the call itself will appear on the Finesse agent desktop in both the success or failed case. So, I guess it all depends on how good of a user experience you want on your website that is embedded in the iframe. If you don't care, then you can either just do the Make call REST API request and call it a day, or do the polling.

Thanx,

Denise