Today I would like to talk a little bit about black listing and white listing of calls into the SwyxWare.

 

Black listing means, that if a caller number is on the so called "black list" the call will be rejected. All other calls will be connected.

White listing means, that if a caller number is on the so called "white list" the call will be connected. All other calls will be rejected.

 

Both attempts can easily be implemented within the SwyxWare call routing:

 

 

Simple Black Listing

 

 

 

Simple White Listing

 

 

 

The final call routing rule should be placed on top of this list of rules within the users' or groups' Call Routing Manager.

 

 

 

By leaving the rule through the Rule skipped exit, the following call routing will be executed (which should/will connect the caller).

 

To block a caller the Terminate Call block is used to disconnect the call. Within its properties you can define what the caller should get signalled. The examples here signal Busy, but its up to you, what you want to select here.

 

After disconnecting the call an Insert Script Code blocks is used, to prevent a call journal (phone call list) entry to be written for this blocked call. This is done by calling the Server Script API function PBXCall.PhoneCallListEntry.Delete. It will hide this call completely from the user. Of course it still appears in the SwyxWare Call Detail Records.

 

 

In both examples a Call block is used, to define the list of numbers. You can configure multiple numbers by separating them by a ; (semicolon).

 

 

 

For one or two numbers on the black or white list this block is certainly the one to use. But if you have to handle a larger list of phone numbers, which might also have to be edited by other users who do not have access to the Call Routing Manager you might want to think of another place where to keep that list.

 

Two possibilities would be for example to keep such a list in a database or text file and check against these lists from whith in the call routing. The function collection here on Swyx Forum holds two functions showcasing how to check if a caller is known within a database or text file:

• CheckCallerInDatabase
• CheckCallerInTextFile

 

Instead of the Call block you can use an Evaluate block to call the chosen function, as they both return true or false if the caller is known. Please follow this link to learn on how to copy functions from the function collection into a GSE rule and how to call them aterwards in there.

 

 

As a next step you might want to make these back/white list call routing globally available for all users in your SwyxWare. In general call routing rules are always LOCAL to a user and can't be made GLOBAL. One exception of that rule is the so called PreProcessing. In the next blog post I will tell you all there is to know about this special type of GSE call routing rule. 

 

 

Please note: this blog post only covers VBScript based call routing as of the time of writing this article the current version of Lua based call routing (still in beta state) does not include database access and I wanted to have this article as complete as possible. Once database access will become available for Lua based call routing I will provide the missing information to this post.

 

 

Black List (VBScript based)

BlackList.rse

 

White List (VBScript based)

WhiteList.rse

 

 

Enjoy!

 

PS: don't miss to take a look into the ECR Useful Link Collection.