UCMA Workflow: AttendedTransfer: a better version of BlindTransfer

If you’ve been following the last couple of posts I’ve been doing, you’ll know that I mentioned (here and here) that the default provided shape for performing a transfer, the blindTransfer shape, is OK but has some serious shortcomings. The biggest is that if the called party doesn’t pick-up, the call is dropped. The transfer has already happened, and there’s no way you can recover from this, or “know” that the transfer didn’t succeed.

On the other hand an “attended transfer” will wait until the called party picks up the call, only then transferring the call. Therefore you can add error handling to recover from errors during the transfer, or if no-one answers.

After giving it some thought, I’ve decided not to document blow-for-blow how to do this, other than to say that you can. The reason for this is that exactly this scenario is given in the Durzi/Greenlee book Professional Unified Communications, which has been my learning guide to date, and it seems a bit disingenuous to copy-paste the example at their expense. Instead, I recommend you get hold of this book, because on page 462 you’ll find exactly what you’re looking for. Here’s some extract from Google Books, which I hope the authors don’t mind me linking to:

The important thing to add is that this works, and works well. If you’re looking to perform an attended or supervised transfer in UCMA using the Workflow SDK, this approach should work for you.