Forwarding a call to a custom number using Twilio and twiml

Question

I'm trying to setup a simple call forwarding app using twiml only. The process flow I'm trying to accomplish is;

Call twilio #

say prompt to ask for the phone number to dial

dial to that phone number

Reading the documentation it looks fairly simply to gather the number;

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Response>
    <Gather action=“this is where the dial action goes” timeout="10" finishOnKey="*">
        <Say>Please enter the phone number and press *.</Say>
    </Gather>
</Response>

This should simply enough ask for a phone number, and log it as digits.

Next up the process should be to use dial to dial those digits, but that's where I'm a little lost. I've used dial several times, but not sure how to chain these two together.

 <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
    <Response>
    <Dial>
   "the digits passed from gather"
    </Number>
    </Dial>
    </Response>

Ideally I think it makes sense the dial command goes into the action="" section of the gather, but I'm not sure if that's doable. Any ideas on where to go from here?

McCann McCann · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-15T19:02:19

Your response needs to include the opening tag for Number...

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<Response>
<Dial>
<Number>
   *digits*
</Number>
</Dial>
</Response>

https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/twiml/number

To connect the original Say/Gather response to the generated response, you need to specify a callback action, while I think you may be able to specify an XML file (making sure to set the method to GET instead of the default POST), but I don't believe xml has the ability to use a passed parameter. You need to use php or something that can be passed the digits (with PHP it's like this):

<?php
echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n";
echo "<Response><Dial><Number>$_REQUEST['Digits']</Number></Dial></Response>";
?>

https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/twiml/gather

Forwarding a call to a custom number using Twilio and twiml

2 Answers