If you want to write software that can manage conferences, record calls, or track call information, the Avaya Device, Media, and Call Control (DMCC) service is the ticket. As is often the case, building cool capabilities such as these into your application comes down to figuring out exactly the right way to talk to the service that provides them. That means finding the proper sequence of operations and the state information that you need to keep from call to call. Luckily, Avaya provides the DMCC Dashboard—a tool molded just for this purpose. It's a desktop application that guides you through the right sequence of operations and lets you watch and record XML messages seen by the Avaya Application Enablement (AE) Services server (the software that provides the DMCC interface). In this article, we'll set up a DMCC Dashboard and discuss some of the things it can do to make device, media, and call control application development easier.
DMCC is one of the services provided by the Avaya AE Services platform. The DMCC service provides an API through which applications can access the device, media and call control functions of Avaya Communication Manager. That's actually three sets of related functions: device control, to control or monitor buttons, display, and other features of physical devices; media control, to access RTP voice stream data; and basic third-party call control, including placing calls between stations, transferring calls and creating conferences. The DMCC service API is a set of XML messages exchanged between a client application and AE server. Avaya provides SDKs that wrap the XML API for both Java and .NET development environments, or you can code directly to the XML API if you are working with other languages.
DMCC Dashboard is included with the DMCC .NET SDK. At its most basic, the dashboard allows you to exercise DMCC API functions by entering call parameters and then clicking buttons to execute calls. You can then watch the XML that's generated and sent to the service. On return, the DMCC Dashboard populates other controls with identifiers or additional return values that you might need for subsequent calls. Beyond this basic use, the DMCC Dashboard may be used to examine .NET API calls available for DMCC services, monitor messages between applications and AE Services, to generate templates for your own XML messages, and to help in automatic testing.
Setting Up the DMCC Dashboard
The DMCC Dashboard is easy to get, and easy to install. You can download the DMCC .NET SDK from Avaya DevConnect (you need to be a registered developer, but registration is free). The downloaded SDK is a zip file which includes the .NET DMCC SDK assembly (called ServiceProvider.DLL), examples and documentation, and a dashboard directory. Unzip the zip file and the dashboard is essentially installed. You can run the DMCC Dashboard .NET application directly from the dashboard directory, which includes ServiceProvider.DLL and configuration files.
If you're running on your company's network, where you can reach Avaya Communication Manager and AE Services, you're ready to roll. When you make your first API call (StartApplicationSession) from the dashboard, you'll provide DMCC login information and the DMCC IP and DMCC port to initiate a session.
As an alternative to developing and testing applications on a production switch, you can run DMCC Dashboard against the Avaya IP Communications Development Environment (Avaya IPCoDE) simulator. I tested DMCC Dashboard against Avaya IPCoDE running locally on my development machine. Avaya IPCoDE, formerly the Avaya AE Services & Communication Manager simulator, is a set of VMware virtual machine images that include simulator versions of Avaya Communication Manager, AE Services and Avaya SIP Enablement Services. In my setup, these virtual machines ran within a VMware host-only network. Avaya IPCoDE is available through the DevConnect program, but it's not downloadable.
To complete my test setup I also added an Avaya IP Softphone (also available through Avaya DevConnect). The Softphone can be controlled by the device control functions of DMCC. I ran the Softphone on the host. Since only one Softphone is supported per IP, I also created additional simulated phones through the DADS console supplied with Avaya IPCoDE.
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