Changing Subscribers Message Notification.

[scott.petersen]

We are trying to programatically change the phone number dialed out of an afterhours help desk voicemail box. We have used the stored procedures and have success on changing the number in SQL but the change does not take effect. Does anyone know what may need to be done to synchronize the objects to have this change take effect. We have tried several things to no avail. We are running unity version 4.05

TIA

Scott

[lindborg]

Right off hand I'm not sure why this wouldn't work if done properly. Testing on my 4.1(1) box here at my desk it seems to take just fine going that route. There is no object to synchronize here - notificaition information does not get pushed/pulled to/from the external directory, it lives only in SQL itself.

So if you change the number via the stored proc you're using and you go into the SA and pull up that notification device, the updated number is not there? My first guess is you're changing the wrong notification rule/device if that's the case... if the number DOES come up and the rule is active and such, what is happening then? Is the "old" number still being dialed when the notification event triggers for that device? Not sure what you mean by the number doesn't take effect.

Come to think of it - if you're using sp_ModifyNotificationDevice, this may not have worked properly in 4.0(5) - I believe I had to work around this in BulkEdit, I'll have to check. If you're calling the SP and you manually check the DB after this and the change is not there, then the proc is not working properly and you'd be forced to do a direct table update to make the change...

[scott.petersen]

Thanks Jeff,

We actually directly populated the SQL database with an update query and the interesting things we are seeing is that if we modify the table it shows the correct modification and if we go into SA it shows the right phone number but when you leave a message it actually calls the old number. If I make a change in SA and save the new number gets called. I don't know if this helps shed some light on our issue. So it would seem that something else gets modified from SA than just the phone number template. Here is an example of the direct update...

update unitydb.dbo.NotificationDevice

set DlvdevicePhoneNumber = '95551212'

where ParentObjectId = '{253AD444-39B5-4C3C-B92A-15065CB932D0}'and Alias = 'Home Phone'

[lindborg]

yeah, after I posted this I had a vague memory of dealing with this. I went back and looked at the Bellhop service code from a while ago and then remembered what's going on here.

notification devices (delivery and MWI) are a little bit "special" here. Most items read directly from SQL with the exception of a few things in the configuration tables which are read only at startup. Notification devices are different in that they read their information into memory and need to have their COM interfaces "tickled" before they'll go reread the info from SQL again, at least in Unity (Connection has a different scheme for this and it's not necessary).

So the reason you're not seeing it dial the update number is because it's still using what's cached in RAM. In Bellhop I actually fire up a COM connection to the notifier itself and call the "resync" method for the user I updated (in the case of Bellhop this is to turn off MWI capabilities for a checked out hotel guest). Unfortunately this is the only way to do this... that's what the SA is doing by going through the DOH- the notifier's interface is "kicked" when a value is updated.

you can also start/stop the notifier interface entirely - but this is a really heavy method since it has to relog into everyone's mailbox...

[scott.petersen]

Do you have a an example of doing this programatically so that we can see how difficult that would be to recreate for our instance?

[lindborg]

yes - it has to be done on box and you're well outside of supported territory but I can shoot you some sample code if you like. Ping me off line at lindborg at cisco dot com.