Cisco Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal 11.0(1) Developer's Guide
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Chapter 8: Standard Decision Elements
Decision elements apply business logic to decide which exit state to return. A pre-built,
configurable decision element has already defined the business logic and only requires a
configuration to modify its behavior. Standard decision elements, however, are defined by the
developer and have no configuration since they represent decisions specific to an application. For
simple to moderately complex decisions, Cisco Unified CVP provides a means of defining
decisions without programming by constructing an XML document (the Unified CVP XML
decision format is described in Chapter 2 of the VoiceXML Server User Guide for Cisco Unified
Customer Voice Portal). Should this format prove insufficient, Java or XML APIs are provided
to allow the developer to build the business logic programmatically.
configurable decision element has already defined the business logic and only requires a
configuration to modify its behavior. Standard decision elements, however, are defined by the
developer and have no configuration since they represent decisions specific to an application. For
simple to moderately complex decisions, Cisco Unified CVP provides a means of defining
decisions without programming by constructing an XML document (the Unified CVP XML
decision format is described in Chapter 2 of the VoiceXML Server User Guide for Cisco Unified
Customer Voice Portal). Should this format prove insufficient, Java or XML APIs are provided
to allow the developer to build the business logic programmatically.
A standard decision element, in addition to the functionality provided all components, is allowed
to create and modify element data.
to create and modify element data.
Using the Java API
A standard decision element is built in Java by extending the abstract base class
DecisionElementBase
found in the
com.audium.server.voiceElement
package (this
package’s name is such due to backwards compatibility considerations). It contains a single
abstract method named
abstract method named
doDecision
that acts as the execution method for the decision element,
and must be implemented by the developer. The method receives two arguments: the name of the
decision element (as a
decision element (as a
String
) and an instance of
DecisionElementData
. This class belongs to
the Session API and is used to access session information (See Chapter 3: Session API for more
on this API). The method expects a
on this API). The method expects a
String
object in return containing the exit state in the exact
format specified in Unified CVP VoiceXML Studio when the standard decision element was first
defined.
defined.
The
DecisionElementBase
class defines many methods in addition to
doDecision
. These are
used for configurable decision elements, which also extend the class. The only method required
for generic decision elements is
for generic decision elements is
doDecision
, as it is the only abstract method in
DecisionElementBase.
Using the XML API
As described in Chapter 3: Session API, the standard “inputs” and “settings” XML documents
are sent via POST to the decision element URI. An additional parameter, called “name”, is sent
containing the name of the decision element. Figure 8-1 shows the DTD diagram of the XML
document that must be sent in response. The DTD for the generic action element response is
defined in the file
are sent via POST to the decision element URI. An additional parameter, called “name”, is sent
containing the name of the decision element. Figure 8-1 shows the DTD diagram of the XML
document that must be sent in response. The DTD for the generic action element response is
defined in the file
DecisionResponse.dtd
found in the VoiceXML Server
dtds
folder.