Cisco Cisco Computer Telephony Integration Option 8.5 Developer's Guide

This chapter discusses coding conventions used in the CTI OS Client Interface Library (CIL).  Coding 
conventions are standard ways of performing common tasks. While the rest of this document discusses 
the programming interfaces available with the CIL, this chapter provides useful and practical 
explanation of how to program with the CIL –  the glue that brings everything together.

One of the design goals of the CTI OS CIL is to make programming as easy and consistent as possible 
for client developers. As such, many design decisions about the CIL interfaces were made in order to 
keep things simple, clear, and consistent across various objects, methods, and programming 
environments. 

This chapter discusses the following topics:

Data types

Asynchronous execution (error codes versus events)

Generic interfaces with the 

Arguments structure

Optional and reserved parameters

Accessing properties and parameters with 

GetValue

Adding parameters to requests with 

AddItem

Setting properties with 

SetValue

UniqueObjectIDs: how to identify objects

Obtaining an object from its 

UniqueObjectID

Using Button Enablement Masks

Methods that call 

AddRef()

The CTI OS Client Interface Library is designed to be a single interface, which can be used across 
multiple languages and environments (e.g. C++, COM, Visual Basic, Java, and .NET). However, each 
programming language has its own native data types. Throughout this document, the interface 
parameters will be listed with the following standardized data types:

STRING: This is a variable-length string variable. If a maximum length exists, it is listed with the 
parameter description.

INT: This is a 32-bit wide integer. 

UNSIGNED INT: This is a 32-bit wide unsigned integer.