As you use the Telecom Web Services Server (TWSS) APIs to develop services, there are a number of ways in which you can set up notification for your applications. Three basic notification options are available to you, and you can use them individually or in combination to get the notification scheme that best fits your needs.
Most of the Parlay X specifications define a Notification interface. For example, the SMSNotificationManager defines a Notification interface.
You can use these interfaces in combination, and you can use them individually, as needed.
Each option is described in more detail in the following sections.
The Notification Management component is designed to provide simple information that can be used by an administrator or care representative to view information about active notifications in the system. The API also allows those individuals to reset outstanding notifications through termination; upon termination, the client-side application would need to reestablish the notification.
Provided with the TWSS product as one of the Service Platform components, Notification Management captures information about active notification registrations on the Service Platform. You can use this information for administrative purposes. Web service implementations register and remove notifications as they are created or torn down. Notification Management also gathers statistics about notification deliveries and failures. These statistics can provide useful information for an administrator wishing to gain insight into notification delivery in a system while it is running.
This component is intended only for capturing information about notifications on the platform and for capturing statistics around notification delivery attempts. Each Web service implementation should manage storage of notification data in the manner that is most efficient for it. The Notification Management component includes an administrative interface for querying notification information and for terminating active notifications.
Notification Management is used by the SMSNotificationManager service implementation to register created notifications or to remove a registration for stopped notifications. Optionally, a custom Web service implementation might also use this component, if there is a need for administrative tracking of created notifications.
Notification Management is also used by the PX Notification component to track statistics about sent notifications. Although there is no user interface for managing these registered notifications, the information can be accessed through a Web services API.
For more information, refer to the topic Notification Management component Web service in the Introduction section of this information center.
Like Notification Management, PX Notification is provided with the TWSS product as one of the Service Platform components. It works with the Parlay X-compliant Web service implementations, providing facilities for delivering notifications through the Access Gateway to the destination endpoint.
PX Notification is used to format and process outbound notifications when they are received from the network. For example, the SMS Web service invokes PX Notification for outbound messaging flows and for outbound delivery receipt flows (that is, flows from the telecom network, through TWSS, toward the application).
PX Notification invokes the Notification Management component in order to track statistics–for example, how many notifications of a given registered type have been sent. For a custom service, this call by PX Notification to Notification Management is effectively a no-op if there are no tracked registered notifications in the Notification Management common component (that is, if the custom service did not originally use Notification Management to register created notifications).
Note that each Parlay X interface has a corresponding WSDL and interface for PX Notification. For example, SMSNotification is the specific version of PX Notification that must be used within SMS service implementations.
Many Parlay X Web service implementations require sending outbound Web Service notifications to Web service clients as an indicator of network events. A single network event might result in multiple outbound notifications. The PX Notification component provides facilities for delivering notifications to the destination endpoint through the TWSS Access Gateway. This component also provides an asynchronous model for invocation, in which an application can send a notification, continue its processing without blocking, and then receive a confirmation of delivery. PX Notification is specific to Parlay X because it contains an interface design intended to deliver Parlay X notifications and because its implementation need to include Parlay X-specific stubs.
PX Notification decouples the Web service implementations from the mechanics of delivering the notifications. This includes any necessary persistence of notifications and modification of outbound messages so that they can pass through the Access Gateway.
The SMSNotificationManager interface, defined as part of the Parlay X standard, is the external interface used by a TWSS application to specify which SMS notifications the application is to receive.
The SMS-based Web service implementations use the Notification Management component Web service to track such notification registrations.