Last month I created an article titled Creating a conference call using RingCentral’s Voice API. In that article I showed you how a RingCentral conference works. In the user story described in that article, participants need to call the host number. If there is no conference ongoing, a conference will be created automatically. And participants who call the host number will be brought into the conference automatically.
However, there is another user story: let the host call participants instead to bring them into the conference. This way the waiting time for participants could be minimized. Let’s say there are 10 participants, it may take 5 minutes for all of them to dial in. But if the host call them simultaneously, it only takes 10–30 seconds for them to join the meeting (depends on how fast they answer the call.)
User Story
In this article, I will cover the user story of host calling a participant to bring him/her into the meeting. The whole user story is like this:
- user A call host (manually)
- host answer the call (automatically)
- a conference is created (automatically)
- user A is brought into the conference (automatically)
- host call user B (automatically)
- user B answer the call (manually)
- user B is brought into the conference (automatically)
The main logic
At the beginning, we need to create a subscription to listen to /restapi/v1.0/account/~/telephony/conference events:
When user A calls the host, there is no conference ongoing, so we need to create the conference:
After conference is created, the very first thing to do is to bring user A into the conference:
And whenever user B answers the call from host, we also want to bring user B into the conference:
Automate it
Let check what have been covered so far:
Step #1 and #6 are done by user A and user B, we don’t need to write any code for them.
Step #3, #4 and #7 are covered by the section above. We have written code to do the tasks automatically.
How about step #2 and #5? We need a way to automate them. Thanks to the RingCentral Softphone SDK, it is not hard at all:
You may be wondering what is the step “auto dial voiceCallToken” in the screenshot above? If you have this question, please read Creating a conference call using RingCentral’s Voice API to find the answer.
Source code
Source code for this article is open source and available here.
Summary
In this article, I covered an interesting case for RingCentral conference call: host call participants to bring them into the conference. I implemented an interesting user story and provided the full source code. If you have requirements to have a conference feature in your own projects, don’t hesitate to refer to my code. Thanks for reading.
