Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Third part of international phone number parsing, validation and formatting for Smart Office

I just completed implementing international phone number parsing, validation and formatting for Accounts in Infor Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) in Infor Smart Office. This complements my previous work on international phone number parsing, validation and formatting for M3 MForms like CRS610/E.

To implement the solution I used libphonenumber (C#), the known C# port of “Google’s phone number handling library, powering Android and more”, I used the Infor Smart Office SDK, and I did a lot of hacking CLM.

Here is the result for an invalid phone number:

Here is a phone number entered in various non-normalized formats before saving the Account:

Here are the resulting normalized phone numbers after having saved the Account:

Here is a video of the result (watch in full-screen HD for better viewing):

This solution works for saving new accounts and for updating existing accounts. From a development point of view, I had to respectively handle the event OnEntityBeforeSave for a modal dialog box and the event OnEntityBeforeUpdate for a dashboard task.

Note this solution will only apply to the CLM user interface in Smart Office and not to other CLM user interfaces like CLM Web client, it will not apply retro-actively to phone numbers previously stored in the database, and it will not apply to phone numbers eventually synchronized in the background server-to-server from other sources like CRS610; those scenarios would need to be handled separately.

That’s it! If you like it, click the Follow button below to subscribe to this blog, let me know what you think in the comments below, and spread the word.

Second part of international phone number parsing, validation and formatting for Smart Office

I just implemented international phone number parsing, validation and formatting for all MForms in Smart Office as an implementation of my previous post for a customer that needed to enforce this validation rule, and I will share my findings here with you.

Overview

I used libphonenumber-csharp, the known C# port of “Google’s phone number handling library, powering Android and more”.

I integrated it with Smart Office SDK as an MForms extension with Global scope so it applies to all MForms programs that have phone number fields, for instance CRS610, CRS620, and OIS002. For that I followed Peter’s post: Introduction to MForms extensions.

Then, if the phone number is not valid, I show an error message in MForms, I set focus in the corresponding input field, and I cancel the user request. For that I followed Peter’s other post: Validating M3 panels using JScript and MI programs before a request.

And if the phone number is valid, I re-format it in E.164 phone number format.

Then, I deployed it globally to all users via Infor LifeCycle Manager (LCM).

Now users have to enter valid phone numbers in MForms or they will get an error message that will prevent them from moving forward.

Hunt for the phone number fields

In order to make it work for all MForms, I had to determine what is the set of M3 programs, panels, and phone number fields.

A quick scan in the XML View Definitions gives:

4,260 programs (E:\M3BE\MVX\15.1\base\viewdefs>dir *.xml /s)
72,212 panels (findstr /c:”\<Panel” /s *.xml)
144,377 fields (findstr /c:”\<EntryField” /s *.xml)

That’s too big of a space to search exhaustively.

Then, I did a quick search in MetaData Publisher for the strings: phone, facsimile, fax, and mobile. Here is a screenshot:

There were 173 results for phone including telephone, the search is case insensitive, 72 results for facsimile, no results for mobile, and results for fax with type checkbox and text that are unrelated to our problem at hand. That narrows down the search space to only 245 fields.

I merged both result sets, I removed the field name prefixes to keep only the radices, and I eliminated duplicates, and that further narrowed down the search space to only nine fields: APHN, CAPH, CPHN, GPNO, PHN1, PHN2, PHNO, SPHN, and TFNO. Here is a screenshot:

Then, I did the reverse search in MDP to verify that every field is a phone number, to prove the space is bijective, and I realized there are three fields that end in TFNO – they are CPTFNO, PPTFNO, and SPTFNO – that are not phone number fields. We can eliminate those fields by looking up the type and length of the field: it must be String of length 16.

Thus, the resulting set of all phone number fields across all of M3 is the following:

APHN
CAPH
CPHN
GPNO
PHN1
PHN2
PHNO
SPHN
TFNO String[16]

A quick verification by scanning the View Definitions for those fields shows the following M3 Programs: APS095, APS200, ARS025, ARS115, ARS175, ARS200, ARS360, ARS390, CBS020, COS105, CRS435, CRS530, CRS538, CRS605, CRS609, CRS610, CRS620, CRS623, CRS690, CRS691, CRS739, CRS949, CSS204, CSS205, DRS013, GMS090, GMS200, LTS100, LTS101, MHS813, MHS850, MHS890, MMS005, MMS453, MNS100, MNS150, MNS205, MNS212, MOS156, MOS272, MOS295, MSS225, MTS201, MWS098, MWS099, MWS212, OIS002, OIS054, OIS055, OIS056, OIS102, OIS269, POS010, PPS171, PPS200, PPS360, PPS370, PPS390, QQS001, QUS095, QUS100, QUS112, RMS421, RSS103, RSS303, SAS002, SOS100, SOS101, SOS102, SOS105, SOS106, SOS110, SOS165, SOS375, SOS378, SOS435, SOS485, SOS520, SOS650, SOS972, SPS200, STS050, STS100, STS101, STS201, TXS100, TXS130, TXS140, TXS510. I recognize CRS610, CRS620, and OIS002 so I’m confident.

My approach is heuristic and is not guaranteed to be exact.

Source code

Here is the source code in C#:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using libphonenumber;
using MForms;
using MForms.Extension;

namespace PhoneNumberValidation
{
    public class PhoneNumberValidationExtension : IPanelExtension
    {
        private static String validKeys = "F3,F4,F5,F12";
        private static String phoneNumberFields = "APHN,CAPH,CPHN,GPNO,PHN1,PHN2,PHNO,SPHN,TFNO";
        private static readonly log4net.ILog Logger = Mango.Core.LogManager.GetLogger(System.Reflection.MethodBase.GetCurrentMethod().DeclaringType);

        public void Load(PanelExtensionEventArgs e)
        {
            try
            {
                InstanceController controller = (InstanceController)e.Controller;
                controller.Requesting += OnRequesting;
                controller.Requested += OnRequested;
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Logger.Error("Failed to handle extension event", ex);
                throw new ApplicationException();
            }
        }

        void OnRequesting(Object sender, CancelRequestEventArgs e)
        {
            try
            {
                if (e.CommandType == "KEY" && validKeys.Contains(e.CommandValue))
                {
                    // Request allowed
                    return;
                }
                // validate all phone numbers in this panel
                InstanceController controller = (InstanceController)sender;
                Grid content = controller.RenderEngine.Content;
                IList<FrameworkElement> controls = controller.RenderEngine.Controls;
                foreach (FrameworkElement control in controls)
                {
                    if (control is System.Windows.Controls.TextBox)
                    {
                        TextBox txtbox = (TextBox)control;
                        String baseName = txtbox.Name.Substring(2);
                        bool IsPhoneNumberField = phoneNumberFields.Contains(baseName) && txtbox.MaxLength == 16;
                        if (IsPhoneNumberField)
                        {
                            if (txtbox.Text != "")
                            {
                                try
                                {
                                    PhoneNumber number = PhoneNumberUtil.Instance.Parse(txtbox.Text, RegionInfo.CurrentRegion.Name);
                                    if (number.IsValidNumber)
                                    {
										txtbox.Text = number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.E164);
                                    }
                                    else
                                    {
                                        controller.RenderEngine.ShowMessage("The phone number is not valid.");
                                        txtbox.Focus();
                                        e.Cancel = true;
                                    }
                                }
                                catch (com.google.i18n.phonenumbers.NumberParseException ex)
                                {
                                    Logger.Debug(ex.Message);
                                    controller.RenderEngine.ShowMessage(ex.Message);
                                    txtbox.Focus();
                                    e.Cancel = true;
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Logger.Debug(ex.ToString());
            }
        }
        void OnRequested(Object sender, RequestEventArgs e)
        {
            try
            {
                InstanceController controller = (InstanceController)sender;
				// clean-up
                controller.Requesting -= OnRequesting;
                controller.Requested -= OnRequested;
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Logger.Debug(ex.ToString());
            }
        }
    }
}

Result

Here is the result.

Here is a sample user input with phone numbers formatted incorrectly:

Here is the result after parsing, validation, and formatting:

And here is an invalid input and the error message in the status bar:

Future work

As future work, I would like to use ValidationRule which Infor already uses for Infor Document Archive.

That’s it! Check out my series on telephony. And as usual, subscribe, comment, share, and enjoy.

AsYouTypeFormatter for Smart Office

In this post I will introduce a proof-of-concept of AsYouTypeFormatter for Smart Office. AsYouTypeFormatter is used to “format phone numbers on-the-fly when users enter each digit.” It’s part of the open source library libphonenumber, “Google’s phone number handling library, powering Android and more.” This post complements my previous post where I discussed International phone number parsing, validation and formatting for Smart Office.

AsYouTypeFormatter

In addition to parsing, validation, and formatting, libphonenumber has a nice AsYouTypeFormatter that formats the phone number as the user types it.

You can test it with the Phone Number Parser Demo. Here’s a screenshot:

Standard Smart Office without AsYouTypeFormatter

Here is a demo of entering a phone number in the field WRPHNO in M3. Customer Open – CRS610/E in standard Smart Office (without AsYouTypeFormatter); the phone number is not validated nor formatted:

Smart Office with AsYouTypeFormatter

And here’s the same demo with AsYouTypeFormatter that’s formatting the phone number on-the-fly as I enter each digit (I typed only the digits):

Here is the complete source code for that demo:

import System;
import System.Collections;
import System.Windows.Controls;
import libphonenumber;
import MForms;

package MForms.JScript {
	class Test {
		var debug;
		var formatter: AsYouTypeFormatter = PhoneNumberUtil.Instance.GetAsYouTypeFormatter("US");
		var textboxes: ArrayList = new ArrayList();
		var isTextChanging: boolean = false; // to avoid infinite loop in OnTextChanged
		public function Init(element : Object, args : Object, controller : Object, debug : Object) {
			try {
				// save global variables
				this.debug = debug;
				// attach to the phone fields
				var content = controller.RenderEngine.Content;
				var supportedPhoneFields: String[] = ["WRPHNO", "WRPHN2", "WRTFNO"];
				for (var i: int in supportedPhoneFields) {
					var fieldName: String = supportedPhoneFields[i];
					var textbox: TextBox = ScriptUtil.FindChild(content, fieldName);
					if (textbox != null) {
						textboxes.Add(textbox);
						textbox.add_TextChanged(OnTextChanged);
					}
				}
				controller.add_Requested(OnRequested);
			} catch (ex: Exception) {
				debug.WriteLine(ex);
			}
		}
		/* User is typing */
		function OnTextChanged(sender: Object, e: TextChangedEventArgs) {
			try {
				if (!isTextChanging) {
					var textbox: TextBox = sender;
					if (textbox.Text.Length > 0) {
						// format the phone number as the user is typing it
						var newChar: char = textbox.Text.Substring(textbox.Text.Length - 1);
						var newText: String = formatter.InputDigit(newChar);
						isTextChanging = true;
						textbox.Text = newText;
						textbox.CaretIndex = textbox.Text.Length;
						isTextChanging = false;
					}
				}
			} catch (ex : Exception) {
				debug.WriteLine(ex);
			}
		}
		/* Clean-up */
		function OnRequested(sender: Object, e: RequestEventArgs) {
			try {
				if (sender != null) {
					sender.remove_Requested(OnRequested);
				}
				for (var textbox: TextBox in textboxes) {
					if (textbox != null) {
						textbox.remove_TextChanged(OnTextChanged);
					}
				}
			} catch (ex : Exception) {
				debug.WriteLine(ex);
			}
		}
	}
}

Limitations and future work

But according to this thread, AsYouTypeFormatter doesn’t support the backspace key, nor emptying the field, nor replacing a selection, nor inserting text somewhere in the middle. The solution is to handle all the cases ourselves in code. All these are already implemented in android.telephony.PhoneNumberFormattingTextWatcher. There is a partial port of Android to C# in XobotOS, “a Xamarin research project that explored porting Android 4.0 from Java/Dalvik to C#”. So to properly implement AsYouTypeFormatter in Smart Office we would need to combine libphonenumber-csharp and XobotOS.

That’s it! That was my proof-of-concept demo of AsYouTypeFormatter for Smart Office to format phone numbers in M3 Programs as the user is typing the digits.

Like, share, comment, enjoy.

/Thibaud

International phone number parsing, validation and formatting for Smart Office

Today I will introduce a simple solution to do international phone number parsing, validation and formatting in Infor Smart Office. The goal is to validate phone numbers entered by users in Infor M3 Programs such as M3 Customer – CRS610/E, or in Infor Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) Account Details, against international phone number specifications, and to get the resulting phone number in any of the desired output formats: E.164, international, national, and RFC3966. For that, I will use libphonenumber, “Google’s phone number handling library, powering Android and more”, and more specifically I will use libphonenumber-csharp, the known port for C#.

Examples

Here are some examples of parsing, validation and formatting of a US phone number:

Valid phone number: 415 535 5452
Invalid phone number: 415 535 545222
Country code: 1
Phone Number region: US
Number type: FIXED_LINE_OR_MOBILE
E.164 format: +14155355452
International format: +1 415-535-5452
National format: (415) 535-5452
RFC3966 format: tel:+1-415-535-5452
Format for out-of-country calling from France: 00 1 415-535-5452

Why does it matter?

Phone number parsing, validation and formatting may be important in some scenarios.

For instance, for one of my customers, I’m integrating Cisco IP Communicator and Cisco Agent Desktop with CLM in Smart Office such that when customer service representatives receive incoming phone calls from their customers, Smart Office automatically searches for that incoming phone number in CLM and displays a list of possible matches. Then, the user can select the desired match and open the corresponding CLM Account Details. It saves precious time during the call. I wrote a previous post about it with some preliminary findings.

Conversely, users can click a phone number in CLM to make that outgoing phone call.

To implement that programmatically, how do we match the phone number of the incoming call with the phone numbers entered by users in CLM? Cisco Agent Desktop returns the ANI of incoming phone numbers as format 4155355452. What if the user entered the phone number in CLM as format (415) 535-5452? What if another user entered a duplicate record in CLM as format 415-535-5452? What if a user entered the phone number in CRS610 as format +14155355452? Also, for outgoing calls Cisco Agent Desktop will accept phone numbers as format 14155355452. That’s five different formats for the same phone number, and it requires record linkage.

That’s why it’s crucial to normalize the phone numbers so we can compare them.

Also, M3 and CLM synchronize their records with each other via Event Hub. So we have to validate entries on both sides or they would risk polluting each other.

The solution is to do phone number validation and formatting at user input so the user has a chance to enter the correct phone number. But doing it at the user interface level alone is not sufficient. We would also need to cover the other entry points such as M3 API, M3 Web Services of type M3 Display Program (MDP), and REST/SOAP Web Services. Also, as a reminder, we never do direct data entry in the database with SQL CREATE/UPDATE/DELETE as that could potentially break the integrity of the system, so we don’t need to cover that side.

Insufficient solutions

A naive solution to search a record by phone number is to select all records that match the input without normalization.

For example, searching CLM with SQL could be: SELECT AccountID FROM LCLM.Account WHERE Phone=’4155355452′. But that will fail to find the alternate valid numbers (415) 535-5452 and 415-535-5452. And we would have to protect it against SQL injection attacks.

Another naive solution is to strip all non-digit characters and count the resulting number of characters. For example, phone numbers in the United States have 10 digits, so the valid phone number (415) 535-5452 would be correctly validated, but the alternate valid phone number +1 (415) 535-5452 would incorrectly be rejected whereas it’s valid. We could improve the solution and say we now accept 11 digits, but then the valid French phone number +33 6 15 62 07 51 would incorrectly be validated as a US phone number, which is not true.

We could go further and restrict the space of phone numbers to only a specific country, say United States and use the North American Numbering Plan (NANP). But that will just temporarily buy time as there will likely be a need to support international phone numbers at a later point in the future.

Going further, we could use regular expressions. For example, according to this Microsoft pattern & practices document, the regular expression ^[01]?[- .]?($[2-9]\d{2}$|[2-9]\d{2})[- .]?\d{3}[- .]?\d{4}$ “Validates a U.S. phone number. It must consist of 3 numeric characters, optionally enclosed in parentheses, followed by a set of 3 numeric characters and then a set of 4 numeric characters.” Unfortunately, that will not validate a valid phone number such as +14155355452; we could improve the regular expression to validate the international prefix +1. Also, it will only validate NANP phone numbers, not international numbers; we could add more regular expressions for other countries.

Also, what about legitimate phone numbers with extensions like (415) 535-5452#1738 ?

We could iteratively improve the solutions, adding more tests and fixes, but it will unfortunately prove to be insufficient unless we spend a tremendous amount of effort. It’s like trying to implement ones own library of time and time zones, or trying to implement ones own cryptographic library.

Advantages of using a known library

libphonenumber is “Google’s common Java, C++ and Javascript library for parsing, formatting, storing and validating international phone numbers. The Java version is optimized for running on smartphones, and is used by the Android framework since 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).”

Using proven robust open source libraries is always a good choice. This library is used by the billion Android phones on the market, so that tells something about its robustness and correctness. And it supports Java and JavaScript so we could use it in M3 Business Engine (Java) and H5 Client (JavaScript). And there is a port for C# so we can also use it in Smart Office, which I will.

Examples for Smart Office

I will use libphonenumber-csharp in a Smart Office script.

For that, I need to create a new feature in Smart Office SDK to add a reference to libphonenumber.dll and to deploy it with ClickOnce. I had originally tried simply using System.Reflection.Assembly.LoadFrom(String), but I couldn’t get it to work.

Once I have a reference to the assembly, I validate the phone number with:

import libphonenumber;
...
var number: PhoneNumber = PhoneNumberUtil.Instance.Parse(phoneNumberStr, "US");
if (number.IsValidNumber) {
    // valid
} else {
    // invalid
}

Then, I format the phone number with:

number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.INTERNATIONAL)
number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.NATIONAL)
number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.E164)
number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.RFC3966)
number.FormatOutOfCountryCallingNumber("US")
number.FormatOutOfCountryCallingNumber("FR")

Example for M3 Programs

The sample source code to validate and format phones numbers in M3 Programs is the following:

import System;
import libphonenumber;

package MForms.JScript {
    class Test {
        public function Init(element : Object, args : Object, controller : Object, debug : Object) {
            var number: PhoneNumber = PhoneNumberUtil.Instance.Parse(element.Text, "US");
            if (number.IsValidNumber) {
                debug.WriteLine(number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.INTERNATIONAL));
                debug.WriteLine(number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.NATIONAL));
                debug.WriteLine(number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.E164));
                debug.WriteLine(number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.RFC3966));
                debug.WriteLine(number.FormatOutOfCountryCallingNumber("US"));
                debug.WriteLine(number.FormatOutOfCountryCallingNumber("FR"));
            }
        }
    }
}

Here is a sample screenshot of the validation and formatting of the field Telephone no 1 (WRPHNO) in M3 Customer. Open – CRS610/E:

Example for CLM

My sample source code to validate and format phones numbers in CLM Accounts is the following:

import System;
import System.Windows;
import lclmControls.Classes.UI;
import lclmControls.Common;
import lclmControls.Custom;
import Mango.Services;
import Mango.UI.Core;
import Mango.UI.Services;
import libphonenumber;

package MForms.JScript {
	class Test {
		public function Init(element : Object, args : Object, controller : Object, debug : Object) {
			try {
				var runners: RunnerCollection = DashboardTaskService.Manager.ExecutingTasks();
				var runner: IRunner = runners[4]; // I'm Feeling Lucky
				var task: ITask = runner.Task;
				var view: TabularDetailsView = task.Parameter;
				var detailsView: DetailsView = view.DetailsView;
				var baseDialog: BaseDialog = detailsView.BaseDialog;
				var groups: DataGroup[] = baseDialog.DataGroups;
				var group: DataGroup = groups[0]; // I'm Feeling Lucky
				var sections: DataSection[] = group.GetSections();
				var section: DataSection = sections[0]; // I'm Feeling Lucky
				var dataField: DataField = section.GetField("Phone");
				var dataEditor: FrameworkElement = dataField.DataEditor;
				var txtbox: SingleLineTextBox = dataEditor;
				var number: PhoneNumber = PhoneNumberUtil.Instance.Parse(txtbox.Text, "US");
				if (number.IsValidNumber) {
					debug.WriteLine(number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.INTERNATIONAL));
					debug.WriteLine(number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.NATIONAL));
					debug.WriteLine(number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.E164));
					debug.WriteLine(number.Format(PhoneNumberUtil.PhoneNumberFormat.RFC3966));
					debug.WriteLine(number.FormatOutOfCountryCallingNumber("US"));
					debug.WriteLine(number.FormatOutOfCountryCallingNumber("FR"));
				}
			} catch (ex : Exception) {
				debug.WriteLine(ex);
			}
		}
	}
}

Here is a sample screenshot of the validation and formatting of the field Phone in a CLM Account Details View:

This is a proof-of-concept source code for demonstration purposes with “I’m feeling lucky” about the array indexes and not checking if object references are null. I will let the reader write the proper, and more lengthy code.

Completeness

For completeness, a robust solution would need to cover all entry points:

For M3 Programs:

MForms in Smart Office
MForms in H5 Client
M3 API (MvxAPI protocol, REST, and SOAP)
M3 Web Services (MWS) of type M3 Display Program (MDP) (REST and SOAP)

For the M3 UI, the solution would involve a combination of Smart Office Scripts in .NET, and H5 Client Web Parts in JavaScript. And for the backend, it would be M3 Java modifications with MAK; using Event Hub would be too late.

For CLM:

CLM in Smart Office
CLM-Web
CLM REST Web Services
CLM SOAP Web Services

For the CLM UI, the solution would involve the same combination of Smart Office Scripts in .NET, and H5 Client Web Parts in JavaScript. And for the backend, I’m not a CLM expert but I heard database triggers would do it.

Also, we would need to do retro- validation and formatting of phone numbers that were already entered in the M3 Programs and CLM.

That’s a lot of work.

My wish

My wish is that Infor Product Development implements phone number validation standard into Smart Office. Same for address validation in M3.

Conclusion

In this article I introduced my simple solution to do phone number parsing, validation and formatting for M3 Programs and CLM Accounts in Smart Office using the proven open source library libphonenumber and its known port for C#. I also explained why parsing, validation and formatting of phone numbers matters in some cases. I implemented a demo for M3 Programs and one for CLM Account Details. I also presented my thoughts on insufficient solutions. Then, I discussed what a complete solution would look like.

In my next article, I will present a proof-of-concept of AsYouTypeFormatter to format a phone number as the user is typing the digits.

That’s it!

If you liked this, please Follow the blog by clicking the button below, and let us know your comments in the section below. And share this with your colleagues, customers and partners to grow the community. Or become an author and share your ideas here. Or be a ninja and create your own blog!

/Thibaud

Hacking Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM)

Today I will show you how I made simple modifications to Infor Customer LifeCycle Management (CLM), the CRM product for Infor M3. With CLM standard out-of-the-box we only have the ability to show/hide fields, for example choosing whether or not we want the name, address, and phone number columns in the list or the fields in the details view. CLM is a great product, and by design it is intended to be simple to use. In my case I wanted something more: I needed to add a call button next to the phone number. That is not officially possible by default so I had to do some hacking.

I’m working on a project for a customer to integrate Cisco IP phones with CLM, such that when a customer service representative on the phone receives an incoming phone call we automatically pop-up the corresponding customer data on the screen, and conversely, such that they can click a phone number in CLM and make that outgoing phone call. I had already done some work in the past integrating Skype with Smart Office, and integrating ShoreTel phones with Smart Office. This time it’s Cisco IP phones. I cannot show you the entire source code as it’s propriety of the customer and my employer, but I will show you interesting bits and pieces, and the writing helps me clean-up my code too.

I will show you:

How to get the list of open CLM windows
How to find the phone number field
How to add a button to CLM and use the Design System Icons
How to make the outgoing phone call

About CLM

To tell if you have CLM, go to Smart Office > Help > About Infor Smart Office > View features, and you will see CLM Application:

Then, go to the Navigator widget, you will see the menu Customer Lifecycle Management, expand it and launch My Accounts > All:

It will open the list of accounts:

Double-click one of the rows to open the account details:

How to get the list of open CLM windows

Now we have two CLM windows open: the list of accounts, and the details of an account. To programmatically get that list, I use the DashboardTaskService.FindRunningTaskByUri method, to discriminate by Uri lclm://


var list /*System.Collections.Generic.List<Mango.UI.Services.FindTaskResult>*/ = DashboardTaskService.Manager.FindRunningTaskByUri("lclm://", TaskMatch.StartsWith);
for (var result : FindTaskResult in list) {
    var runner : IRunner = result.Runner;
    var task : ITask = runner.Task;
    debug.WriteLine(task.Uri);
}

That will return two tasks:
lclm://filter/?ActionType=View&MainTableID=…&FilterGroupID=…&SubFilterID=…
lclm://details/?ActionType=View&MainTableID=…&PrimaryKey=…

Now we need to tell apart the Accounts windows from the other potential CLM windows such as Activities or Contacts:

var host : IInstanceHost = runner.Host;
if (host.HostTitle.StartsWith("Account")) {
    // ...
}

This code will only work for English. Ideally we would use an official CLM API that returns the correct Tasks, but I haven’t found one. Let me know if you find one.

How to find the phone number field

Now that we have the correct window, we can get its contents and find the phone number field. First, I use WPF Inspector to visually introspect the window and find the phone number field in the visual tree:

The fields are layed out in one of the ancestor Grids:

More specifically the phone number field is itself a Grid of one row and three columns:

That’s where I’ll inject my button. To get there programmatically, I use the VisualTreeHelper, and I do a pre-order depth first search:

function ... {
    //...
    var content : FrameworkElement = host.HostContent;
    if (content.GetType().ToString() == "lclmControls.Custom.TabularDetailsView") {
        var o: DependencyObject = FindPhoneTextBox(content);
        if (o != null) {
            var txtbox: SingleLineTextBox = o;
        }
    }
}
function FindPhoneTextBox(o : DependencyObject): DependencyObject {
    // visit node
    if (o != null) {
        if (o.GetType().ToString().EndsWith("SingleLineTextBox")) {
            var txtbox: SingleLineTextBox = o;
            if (txtbox.Name == "Phone") {
                return o;
            }
        }
    }
    // visit children
    for (var i = 0; i < VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(o); i++) {
        var child = VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(o, i);
        var result: DependencyObject = FindPhoneTextBox(child);
        if (result != null) {
            return result;
        }
    }
    // not found
    return null;
}

How to add a button to CLM and use the Design System Icons

Now that we found the phone number field and the Grid, we can add a button. I will use the IconButtons of the Design System as illustrated by norpe:

var btn: IconButton = new IconButton();
btn.IconName = "Phone";
btn.ToolTip = "Call this phone number."
btn.HorizontalAlignment = HorizontalAlignment.Left;
btn.Margin = new Thickness(5, 0, 0, 0);
btn.Tag = txtbox; // remember the textbox
Grid.SetRow(btn, 0);
Grid.SetColumn(btn, 2);
Grid.SetColumnSpan(btn, 2);
var grid: Grid = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(txtbox);
grid.Children.Add(btn);
btn.add_Click(OnCall);

This is the result, with the IconButton hover and ToolTip:

Note: to get the Grid I used the textboxe’s parent. This assumption is true in CLM version 1.0.0.99, but could be false in a future version of CLM in which case this code would break. Ideally we would have an official CLM API for this.

How to make the outgoing phone call

Now you can do whatever with the phone number, for example use the default operating system’s URI handler for the tel scheme which is Skype in my case.

function OnCall(sender: Object, e: RoutedEventArgs) {
    try {
        var btn: Button = sender;
        var txtbox: SingleLineTextBox = btn.Tag;
        var phoneNumber: String = txtbox.Text;
        var uri: Uri = new Uri("tel:" + phoneNumber); // RFC 3966
        ScriptUtil.Launch(uri);
    } catch (ex : Exception) {
        debug.WriteLine(ex);
    }
}

And here’s the result:

The method ScriptUtil.Launch will instruct the operating system to execute the specified command. That’s the equivalent of typing start command at the DOS prompt. In our case it’s:

start tel:+14156247033

That means any special characters of the command must be escaped, such as white spaces and ampersands. To escape white spaces in DOS that means enclosing the entire string in double-quotes. I tried enclosing the URI in double quotes, and it didn’t work. I also tried other escaping and encoding techniques like using backslash, plus sign, and %20, and they didn’t work either. So let’s simply strip it out:

phoneNumber = phoneNumber.Replace(' ', '');

Also, in my example I used a phone number that’s already correctly formatted in international E.123 notation which Skype understands. To validate the phone number, we can use a regular expression. A simple one is to strip all characters and keep only the plus sign and the digits, but that’s probably not fully compliant with the E.123 specification so we need to work more on this in the future:

var regex = /[^\+^\d]/g;
phoneNumber =  phoneNumber.replace(regex, "");

Future work

Future work includes:

Use an event handler to listen for new CLM windows to automatically add the Call button as the user opens the Account views. I couldn’t find an event, and Karin confirmed it’s not currently supported. I tried MForms.MainController, DashboardTaskService, DashboardTaskBar, lclmControls.EventNotifier, WindowManager, etc. I found an event handler for M3 Forms, an event handler for the Quick Start CTRL+R, and private event handlers that would have worked had they been public. Nothing I could use. I ended up using a worker that’s polling Tasks every second in a background thread (yikes).
Remember we added the button so we don’t add it again next time.
Add the Call button on all phone number fields: fax, mobile phone, home phone, etc.
Validate the phone number with a regular expression that complies with the specifications.
Make the outgoing call thru the Cisco IP phone instead of using Skype.
Listen for incoming phone calls.
Move the script to a widget using the Smart Office SDK.

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