API for Webex Calling: manipulating between-user permissions

[thomasguz]

Hi all! I work for a Cisco partner and we are starting to deploy some Webex Calling installations.

Since the web interface and the bulk seems like to not permit certain operations (like manipulating between-user permissions), I thought that I could use the API for that but... well, seems like the /people endpoint doesn't support it (curiously enough, the Workspace has it!).

This is a big miss in my opinion, think of a scenario where you have to create many pickup groups for example: in order to be able to receive the notification of the call, you should add monitoring permissions to each and every participant in the pickup, inserting every other person... this is not feasible for large groups and many pickups.

Am I missing something or it's really not there? Thank you for any insight.

[thomasguz]

Hi! First of all let me thank you all for replying to my post

I recognize my explanation wasn't very clear... basically, I have to update settings for a lot of users, and CSVs don't seem to support some of these operations I need to do.

One example I solved it's this: I had to create pick up groups (easy one apparently), but I also needed to update monitoring permissions between users of the pick up group ('cause if you don't do that, people in your pick up group don't get any notification that they can pick up a call from their peers). If you have 10 people in a pick up group, this means that you have to update each and every one of those persons, enabling them monitoring on the other 9.

It is indeed possible to do that, using the /v1/people/{personId}/features/monitoring endpoint as pointed out by @dtibbe (thank you!). I also found that a Postman collection, sometimes' easier to find the endpoint you're looking for here... https://github.com/webex/postman-webex-calling

I have a other couple of things like that I'm trying to do:

1. modify buttons layout for a user's device (this is a direct consequence of the operation above: when you add a monitored person to a user, a monitoring button is automatically added on the user's phone... but no users wants this! They are confused: "Why do I see my collegue's name here?!?", so I have to manually remove them; that's honestly a TERRIBLE IDEA for a default setting).

2. update a person's announcement language

@sandiban I hope I clarified my point, which is quite different from what you got (and that was definitely my fault).

But you made me think about the problem of making changes in bulk via API... The REST API is cool and powerful, but for every change it seems you need to frequently make more than one call (e.g. to change something on a person, you first need to [1] find the person Id from the email , then [2] get the person details, from this make a new payload with the new setting and [3] push it; that's 3 calls for just 1 operation). Of course you can iterate it, but I think Cisco can do better than this... This leads me to this question: any chance that something like a GraphQL API is going to be implemented? That would be GOLD for massive operations.

[dtibbe · Accepted solution]

There is an endpoint for modifying a user's calling permissions, see https://developer.webex.com/docs/api/v1/user-call-settings. It also allows you to edit the monitoring settings for a user..

[sandiban]

Hi @thomasguz,
Thanks for your patience so far and sharing the background here!
However I'm not clear exactly the requirement or, the exact task you're performing through the mentioned APIs like /people or, /workspace API.
One thing what I can understand is your requirement was for performing BULK operations through these APIs, but yes currently any of the Webex APIs are not capable of doing bulk operations.

But as you mentioned that /workspace API was capable of it, so could you kindly share how you used the /workspace API so that was able to perform the BULK operation, like creating workspace for multiple locations with just one request or, updating multiple workspaces at once - anything like this? I don't think such operations are currently possible even with /workspace API, but may be once you can share the background that you tried - that might help here to understand further.

Otherwise, it's true that mostly the REST APIs don't support BULK operations at this moment and that's a current known limitation of it.

Regards!
Sandip