How To Save a Recording in Tropo using ASP.NET MVC

I was having trouble getting recordings to save while adding the Tropo integration to VoiceModel and I could not find any good examples on how to do this.  Even the examples for TropoCSharp did not show how to save the recordings.  I was able to figure out a solution so I thought I would share it here since there is a lot of requests on the forums to see an example for C# and .NET.  This example was developed using ASP.NET MVC 4.

I thought I could reuse the same action on the VoiceModel controller to save recordings in VoiceXML applications, but it turned out that was not the case. When saving a recording in VoiceXML the voice browser wants the next VoiceXML document when it is completed, which is not the case for Tropo.  The only response that Tropo is looking for is whether it gets an HTTP 200 success code or not.

The other issue is that the MVC controller action wants to match the name in the multipart form data  request with name given for the HttpPostedFileBase object.  Let me show you the code for saving the recording to make this clearer.

        [HttpPost]
        public string SaveRecordingTropo(HttpPostedFileBase filename)
        {
            string msg = "Successfully saved recording.";
            if (filename != null && filename.ContentLength > 0)
            {
                // extract only the fielname
                var fileName = Path.GetFileName(filename.FileName);
                // store the file inside ~/App_Data/recordings folder
                var path = Path.Combine(Server.MapPath(recordingPath), fileName);
                _log.Debug("Received recording and will save as " + path);
                // save the audio file
                filename.SaveAs(path);
            }
            else
            {
                msg = "Recording was null or empty.";
                if (filename == null)
                    _log.Debug("Received request to save recording but it is null.");
                else
                    _log.Debug("Received request to save recording but it is empty.");

            }

            return msg;
        }

The action method takes a parameter called HttpPostedFileBase which is defined as "filename".  In VoiceXML you can specify what the name of this object is. I thought I could specify it using the "name" attribute of the "record" object in Tropo but that would not work using  TropoCSharp.  So I setup WireShark to capture the POST request from Tropo and found that the name it used for the multipart form data is "filename".  Once I changed the name of HttpPostedFileBase to "filename" it started working. When I used a different name this object was always null.

The other thing to remember when setting this up is to make sure that the directory you use to store the save recordings must have write privileges for IIS_USER.  That is all there is to saving an audio recording from Tropo Web API using HTTP POST.  You can get a working example from VoiceModel by getting the source code for changeset 20477 or greater and running the RecordingExample project.  When you setup the application in Tropo you will set the URL to http://server-name/app-path/Record/StartTropo.

There is one variation on handling recordings in VoiceXML and Tropo that I need to work out. With VoiceXML you can listen to the recording while it is still on the VoiceXML platform server and it sticks around for the whole call.  This is nice because you can have the caller listen to the message and confirm that they want it before sending it to your application server. I cannot find an option for doing this on Tropo. I will keep you  posted on what solution I can come up with for handling this.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using Claims in ASP.NET Identity

Claims can simplify and increase the performance of authentication and authorization processes. I wrote about how you can use the roles stored as claims to eliminate back-end queries every time authorization takes place .  ASP.NET Identity has good support for claims-based identity and it creates several claims for you automatically when you create a new identity.  Here is how we create the identity for a new user during the log-in process UserManager<applicationuser> userManager = new UserManager<applicationuser>(new UserStore<applicationuser>(new SecurityContext())); ClaimsIdentity identity = userManager.CreateIdentity(user, DefaultAuthenticationTypes.ApplicationCookie); If you inspect the Claims property of ClaimsIdentity after calling CreateIdentity you will see that there are there are three or more claims. There is a claim for the user ID, user name, identity provider and one for each role assigned. So what if you want to add some more claims? Here...
Keep reading

Customizing Claims for Authorization in ASP.NET Core 2.0

Image
There have been some major changes to ASP.NET Identity with the release of Core 2.0, which you can read about here .  One of the major changes is that it does not rely on using middleware anymore to customize it.  Instead dependency injection is used by configuring via services in the ConfigureServices method of StartUp.cs .   There is not much documentation or examples on how to do this so I am going to explore how to customize ASP.NET Identity and publish some examples in this blog.  First I wanted to look at how you would add custom claims to the identity and then use those claims for authorization. To begin create a new ASP.NET Core Web Application  project in Visual Studio 2017.  Be sure to select . NET Core and ASP.NET Core 2.0 in the two drop downs at the top.  Select the template for Web Application (Model-View-Controller) and Change the Authentication to Individual User Accounts .  When the project is created you are ready to add so...
Keep reading

Seeding & Customizing ASP.NET MVC SimpleMembership

Image
In ASP.NET MVC 4 Microsoft introduced a new membership provider that is referred to as SimpleMembership.  SimpleMembership makes it easier to customize user profiles and incorporates  OAuth support.  I have seen a lot of questions on StackOverflow on how to customize SimpleMembership and seed it with data and in this post I will discuss some methods for achieving both . SimpleMembership uses Entity Framework (EF) 5 and the code-first model. To initialize the database that contains the users and roles a filter is used called  InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.   This attribute is decorated on the AccountController as shown here: [Authorize] [InitializeSimpleMembership] public class AccountController : Controller { ... } This is setup this way so that the initialization code is only called when accessing the actions on the AccountController .  If you look at the code for  InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute you will see a lot of cod...
Keep reading