Cisco Cisco Customer Voice Portal 8.0(1) User Guide

end their calls. This is provided as an aid to the administrator in determining how many callers
are still experiencing the application before the change. Command line arguments passed to the
scripts can turn off this countdown if desired.

When using the JMX interface or if the countdown is turned off in the administration script, the
only way to track the number of callers that are still experiencing the old configuration would
be to get the system status.

Updating Applications

Occasionally, an application will need to be updated. Possible changes can be small, such as
renaming an audio file or altering a TTS phrase, or large, such as adding another item to a menu
and creating a new call flow branch. They can involve simple configuration changes or may
involve new or changed Java class files. While most changes are implemented during
development time, there is a requirement to support updating an application at runtime.

The update functionality acts gracefully in that any callers on the system, at the time of update
continue to experience their calls as if the application had not been updated, while new callers
experience the updated voice application. In this manner, there is no downtime when a change
is implemented for an application, the callers are handled as expected.

VXML Server exposes an update function for every application deployed. This will update just
that application. It also has a function that will update all applications at once.

There are a few items to note when updating individual voice applications.

•

The gracefulness of the update applies only to those resources controlled by VXML Server.
These include the application settings and call flow, element configurations, Unified CVP
decision elements, and Java classes placed in the 

 directory of the

application. The following changes are not managed by VXML Server and therefore will not
be gracefully updated:

–

Java classes placed anywhere else (including the 

 folder).

–

XML content passed to VXML Server via the XML API.

–

The content of VoiceXML insert elements.

–

Other applications that the updated application transfers to or visits as part of a subroutine.

–

External back-end systems such as web services and databases (including the user
management database).

–

Web servers hosting static content used by the application such as audio or grammar files.

When each of these resources become unavailable or change, all callers would be affected.
For small changes such as a revised audio file, this situation may be acceptable. For large-scale
changes that span multiple systems, this could cause problems such as callers who are visiting
an application when the update is made experiencing an error because a database is down.

User Guide for Cisco Unified CVP VXML Server and Cisco Unified Call Studio Release 8.0(1)