Announcing Configurable Callback Retries for Voice
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Voice API
- 24 Feb 2021
With Plivo’s Voice API platform, you can programmatically make, receive, and control calls across the world by integrating voice calling within your applications using only a few lines of code.
However, calls sometimes fail, often as a result of intermittent network issues, and we want to give our customers the flexibility to decide what happens when those errors occur. Maybe you want longer timeouts to better support intermittent network issues between Plivo and your server or application. Or maybe you want to enable HTTP callback connection retries on any failures and timeouts. Or maybe you want to pair those retries with shorter connection timeouts to ensure faster failover to your fallback URL for a better user experience.
With our latest release, the choice is yours. Plivo’s new configurable callback retries feature for our Voice API lets you override our default connection settings to fit your needs and give our Voice customers the ultimate flexibility and control.
How it works
Plivo makes HTTP posts to webhooks as callbacks during different states of a call and to many URLs, such as answer_url, fallback_url, hangup_url, action, and callback_url. Webhooks act as an extension of an API, but instead of your code requesting data from our API platform, Plivo sends the data directly to you.
Whenever a webhook request fails due to some destination server issue, you can configure HTTP callback connection overrides on a per-webhook URL basis. To set a nondefault callback retry configuration for any given URL, you can append configuration parameters to the URL in the form of extensions (also known as fragments) as key-value pairs with the following syntax:
- the first key-value pair should start with #
- key and value should be separated by =
- the key-value pairs should be separated by &
The result might look like https://example.com/answer_url?query=123#ct=2000&rt=3000.
For a full breakdown of the timeouts available for the webhook URLs and their respective allowed values and default values, as well as how to configure the number of retries, see our product documentation.
If you already use Plivo’s Voice API and are familiar with HTTP callbacks, we encourage you to start using these new parameters in your applications. They add great flexibility to Plivo’s webhook callback requests.
Haven’t built a Plivo voice application before? No problem; we have Getting Started guides that can help you start adding voice capabilities to your applicat.
