What does OCS setup look like to Asterisk 1.6?

by community-syndication | Sep 27, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Well folks after my last tutorial, Finally
Connected OCS to Trixbox I’m getting more and more questions about the OCS side
of thingsso I thought I’d expand on our OCS 2007 R2 side of the setup.

So the internal setup looks a little like this:

So here our IP:Z = 10.1.1.30 which makes sense when looking at the OCS machines from
Trixbox as follows:

Note the 10.1.1.30 or IP:Z in the hosts list here from Trixbox. In
short – as far as OCS is concerned when Chatterphone gets a request
(from either internal or external) it *has* to have all the knowledge to work out
where to route the call.

So don’t forget that OCS embeds a VOIP phone details into User Accounts within AD
– viewing the user class object will give you the right details. I wrote a webservice
that will display the user’s phone numbers etc.

I also wrote a quick WebService to pull out phone and sip address
details from AD from a search string. So if you supply part of a phone number, it
gives you the users, and if you have a sip address, it give you the phone number.
(I was going to use it for a lookup from Trixbox cause from OCS Communicator, I couldn’t
get the invite another person to the conf call via phone working – it was sending
an invalid CallerID out to our PSTN provider)

(source code included – as is, for a guide 🙂

Example calls:
I’ve installed it onto a site called ’ocsservices.office.breeze.net’ and
you can run it as follows:

1. Lookup a Phone Number from SIP Address
1. http://<webServer>/OcsHelperService/Lookup.svc/Process?action=getphone&caller=<sip address
   – minus ’ sip:’> e.g. [email protected]
3. Lookup a SIP Address from a Phone Number
1. http://<webServer>OcsHelperService/Lookup.svc/Process?action=getaddr&caller=<start of
   a user’s voip number>

>

Let’s start

Learning – What in the World is OCS doing?

Setup meaningful logging to try and work out what Trixbox<->OCS is doing = MediationServer

1. From the OCS Management Tool – setup a New Debug Session
3. From the OCS 2007 R2 Logging Tool – log S4 and the Mediation Server settings.
5. Then click Start Logging and you should be on your way to recording
   what OCS is doing in response to Trixbox. This helps you find out *exactly* what OCS
   is responding with. Calls, “No Service” etc.
6. Go through and run through a test session of what you’re wanting to try out. e.g.
   incoming call or outgoing call.
7. Click Stop Logging and click Analyze Log Files
9. The OCS 2007 R2 SDK tool – snooper should come to the rescue here
   and display a detailed log of what happened. Colour coded and see what what going
   on.
10. Here’s a sample for an outgoing call:
12. What’s more interesting is an incoming call:
13. In this particular call – I rang my OCS number and hung up after 2 rings. The conversation
    is pretty detailed in terms of what you see with SIP. i.e. Seeing this is the MediationServer there
    should be something like SIP INVITE->Trixbox->SIP INVITE->OCS Mediation
    (Chatterphone)->OCS Server.
    You’ll notice these packets are like IP4 routing packets, with headers possibly changing,
    but you should be able to make out your dialled number in there.

>

This is your handy weapon for OCS land – if communication isn’t getting through, then
check all the IP details.

Incoming calls to OCS

1. Users are generally identified as +<country code><area code><number>
2. If when making an External Call in, make sure in the above logs the number
   coming in is in the right format. i.e. [email protected]
3. What does a User Look Like
1. Firstly they belong to a Location (the Location Name also has implications within
   ExchangeUM if you use it for Voice Mail), looking at the location code I just have
   it stock standard as follows:
3. Finally let’s look at what a user like myself looks like from the OCS Admin Tool.
   (In my case Enterprise Pools->BreezePool1->Users)

>

Hopefully this has helped a little more in working out what is going on in your OCS
world(s).

Between the logging here and the ’Asterisk -r’ option in a console app on Trixbox,
you should be getting a better picture. Because many setups can be very different,
looking down here at the ’packet’ level is really the only way to go in resolving
these.

(Another handy option is to turn on Event Logging in OCS Communicator, which gives
some great info from a client perspective as well 🙂

Good luck. 🙂

Mick.

Don’t be scared of custom disassemblers

by community-syndication | Sep 27, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Update on SOA Conference and Upcoming Events

by community-syndication | Sep 25, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Over the past few months we have talked to a number of customers and partners about our plans for upcoming Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) events.  We have heard loud and clear that travel budgets are limited, and have evaluated the various ways we can share Real World SOA best practices and training to our customers and partners.  As a result of these discussions we have decided not to host the Microsoft SOA conference this year; instead, we will deliver SOA related sessions (including sessions on BizTalk Server, .NET, Visual Studio and SharePoint Server content) at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles (November 17 – 19) and at TechEd EMEA in Berlin, Germany (November 9-13).

Today we are also announcing that we will be bringing a “Business Integration” road show to visit many major cities around the world, which will help us dialog with customers and partners who are not able to travel in this economic climate. 

For more details or to register to one of the road show events please see our Business Integration Road Show site.

XPATH 1.0 XSLT 1.0 Return elements or attributes based upon a max date

by community-syndication | Sep 25, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

While working for a client we had to use some custom XSLT within BizTalk to complete some requirements that was outside the bounds of the BizTalk Mapper and orchestrations. Along with what we were already doing the client came to us and wanted a value assigned to an attribute based up on the most recent input file that had been dropped so essentially based upon the a max date from an array of dates. Come to find out that XPATH 1.0 and XSLT 1.0 can’t select records based upon a max date. Here is how I solved this problem.

I made some generic samples to help explain. Here is a sample input document.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<BatchedFile>
  <Record>
    <InformationElement Date="12/09/2008" ID="TryAgain" />
  </Record>
  <Record>
    <InformationElement Date="11/11/2008" ID="TryAgaine" />
  </Record>
  <Record>
    <InformationElement Date="01/08/2008" ID="TryAgain" />
  </Record>
  <Record>
    <InformationElement Date="03/09/2008" ID="TryAgain" />
  </Record>
  <!-- I Want to pick the following record ID because it is the most recent date- -->

  <Record>
    <InformationElement Date="01/09/2009" ID="YouPickedTheRightOne" />
  </Record>
  <Record>
    <InformationElement Date="07/09/2008" ID="TryAgain" />
  </Record>
  <Record>
    <InformationElement Date="12/09/2008" ID="TryAgain" />
  </Record>  
</BatchedFile>

The trick is to try and compare the dates. XSLT can’t make an array exactly but you can use variables in a similar way and use the node-set() function to select the values within the variable.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl userCSharp" xmlns:userCSharp="http://schemas.microsoft.com/BizTalk/2003/userCSharp" >
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="BatchedFile">
      <!-- First Create a variable that stores the Date Attribute along with its corresponding absolute value-->
      <xsl:variable name="MaxDateRecord">
        <xsl:for-each select ="./Record/InformationElement/@Date">
          <TotalDays>
            <xsl:attribute name ="RecordDate">
              <xsl:value-of select ="self::node()"/>
            </xsl:attribute>
            <!--Please see below for explanation of totalDays function-->
            <xsl:value-of select ="userCSharp:totalDays(self::node())"/>            
          </TotalDays>          
        </xsl:for-each>       
      </xsl:variable>
      <!--I decided to create a variable that stored the most recent date, its easier to debug-->
      <xsl:variable name ="MostRecentDate">
        <!--The predicate after TotalDays is what picks the highest number value, which then corresponds to a date-->
        <xsl:value-of select ="msxsl:node-set($MaxDateRecord)/TotalDays[not(. &lt; preceding-sibling::TotalDays or . &lt; following-sibling::TotalDays)]/@RecordDate"/>
      </xsl:variable>
      <!-- Here is where the output is generated, -->
      <MaxDate>
        <xsl:attribute name="DidIPickTheRightOne">
          <xsl:value-of select ="//InformationElement[@Date=$MostRecentDate]/@ID"/>
        </xsl:attribute>
      </MaxDate>
    </xsl:template>
  <msxsl:script language="C#" implements-prefix="userCSharp">
    <!-- This function takes a date like 09/01/2008 
    and returns the number days that exist between 01/01/1990 
    and the current date selected. Any date would work as a reference
    date.-->
    <![CDATA[
 public static string totalDays(string date)
        {
            DateTime d1 = new DateTime();
            DateTime d2 = new DateTime(1990, 01, 01);
            TimeSpan span = new TimeSpan();
            DateTime.TryParse(date,out d1);            
            span = d1 - d2;
            return span.TotalDays.ToString();
            
        }       
]]>
  </msxsl:script>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Okay here is an explanation of what is going on.

1. I first create a variable (MaxDateRecord) that stores the date value of each record as well as the number of days between that date and Jan 1, 1990. This gives me a numeric value that XSLT can compare.

a. Here is what MaxDateRecord would look like essentially after it had ran through all the iterations of the Record element.

<MaxDateRecord>
<TotalDays RecordDate="12/09/2008">6917</TotalDays>
<TotalDays RecordDate="11/11/2008">6889</TotalDays>
<TotalDays RecordDate="01/08/2008">6581</TotalDays>
<TotalDays RecordDate="03/09/2008">6642</TotalDays>
<TotalDays RecordDate="01/09/2009">6948</TotalDays>
<TotalDays RecordDate="07/09/2008">6764</TotalDays>
<TotalDays RecordDate="12/09/2008">6917</TotalDays>
</MaxDateRecord>

2. I then compare all of the TotalDays and find the largest one and select out the RecordDate that matches.

a. The MostRecentDate variable outputs “01/09/2009” in Visual Studio.

3. After that its an easy process of selecting the Record element with the corresponding MostRecentDate or in this case the ID of that element.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- This is what my output should be -->
<MaxDate DidIPickTheRightOne="YouPickedTheRightOne" />

I hope I have saved some of you some time. Since BizTalk 2009 still uses the 1.0 specification of XSLT and XPath, I was somewhat disappointed to find out there was no direct way to get this done. I know there are better ways to handle the logic I wrote in XSLT so if you have suggestions or criticisms, post them.

I have to give some thanks to Jirka Kosek for the article “Understanding the node-set() Function” http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/16/nodeset.html

as well as lhaeger for the article “Again! The power of XPATH or the missing max() function” http://www.novell.com/communities/node/6431/again-power-xpath-or-missing-max-function

End of the World was near Yesterday in Sydney

by community-syndication | Sep 24, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

I woke up on Wednesday morning to a thick soup blanket of red.

No buildings, no cliffs, no grassjust Red. (We’d been teleported to Mars I thought)

Pretty amazing stuff, here’s some piccies that capture the moment 🙂

Debugging an external assembly that’s called from within a BizTalk process

by community-syndication | Sep 24, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

External assemblies are being called from within BizTalk orchestrations in almost every BizTalk application. Knowing how to debug them is important. This guideline will show you how you can debug those external assemblies on your workstation or a remote box using a very simple sample application. Debugging external assemblies on a local box with one […]

Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program

by community-syndication | Sep 24, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Lazy-Loading with Object Extensions

by community-syndication | Sep 23, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman]

If you make heavy use of lazy-loaded properties, the repetitive if-backing-field-null-then-instantiate code can be centralized in an extension method on the object class:

/// <summary>

/// Extension methods for <see cref=”Object”/>

/// </summary>

public static class ObjectExtensions

{

/// <summary>

/// Lazy-loads a property

/// </summary>

/// <typeparam name=”T”>Type of property</typeparam>

/// <param name=”obj”>Extended object</param>

/// <param name=”field”>Property backing field</param>

/// <param name=”load”>Property loading function</param>

/// <returns>Lazy-loaded property</returns>

public static T LazyLoad<T>(this object obj, ref T field, Func<T> load)

{

if (field == null || field.Equals(default(T)))

{

field = load();

}

return field;

}

}

Classes then define lazy-loaded properties using the extension method, specifying the backing field and the method used to populate it:

protected List<MediaItem> AllItems

{

get

{

return this.LazyLoad<List<MediaItem>>(ref this._allItems,

() => new List<MediaItem>());

}

}

– rather than:

protected List<MediaItem> AllItems

{

get

{

if (this._allItems == null)

{

this._allItems = new List<MediaItem>();

}

return this._allItems;

}

}

Only a tiny enhancement, but it isolates some general code and reduces the chances of causing an infinite loop by typing the property name rather than the field name.

Exploring StreamInsight’s adapter model

by community-syndication | Sep 23, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

Adapters are a fundamental component of Complex Event Processing (CEP) applications. In a nutshell, adapters provide the interfaces that abstracts how events are produced or consumed by the CEP infrastructure. Most CEP frameworks leverage the concept…(read more)

A proposed introduction…

by community-syndication | Sep 23, 2009 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

What a pity. I’ve spent some time recently evaluating SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services with respect to its proposed use on a UK public sector project that will implement a part of the ‘national infrastructure’. In every respect but one, Reporting Services provides an excellent fit for the stated requirements. There is already a commitment to using SQL Server, and SharePoint, within the project, so Reporting Services appears the way to go.

What is the exception? Well, Reporting Services provides a nice little tool called ‘Report Builder’ for creation, amongst other things, of ad hoc reports. This is a user-friendly little gizmo that can be downloaded directly from the portal via Microsoft’s excellent ClickOnce technology. ClickOnce ensures that the application is installed in a sandboxed fashion under the current user’s profile, and does not interfere with other installations for other users.

All good stuff, except that the proposed system needs to provide ad hoc reporting facilities to a number of different agencies across the UK. Oh, and it must be formally accredited by the security people before it can go live. It turns out that there is no prospect that they will agree to installation of any software on client desktops at those agencies. Not even using ClickOnce. It’s out of the question.

SAP offers a similar toolset to Reporting Services, but they have a tool for designing ad hoc reports that is entirely browser-based and has zero footprint on the client.

Mmmm. Time for the Microsoft SQL Server product team to meet Ajax, methinks.