Standalone Application Builder

Generally a designer builds an application in Call Studio and then deploy to Call Services. Call Studio has the ability to deploy an application locally as well as to a remote system via FTP. Deploying an application becomes more difficult in an environment where many designers are working on a single application or when the enterprise follows a strict deployment policy to the runtime servers. In the first scenario, multiple designers are adding content to a source repository system and no single designer may have the full application in necessary to perform the deployment and even if possible, would require coordination among all designers involved. In the second scenario, the production environments do not allow direct access via FTP and require an automated system to place new content on to those environments, providing the flexibility to control exactly how and when the content is deployed. The desire is to extract the ability to create a Call Services application from the Call Studio project without requiring a person to launch Call Studio and deploy.

Universal Edition provides a tool to support this requirement named the Standalone Application Builder. It allows for the deployment of an application through a command-line interface. By exposing this as a command-line tool, an administrator can integrate this tool into any process that has the ability to run scripts. For example, the administrator can configure a crontab to launch this utility every day with the latest content checked into a source repository. Another example is to modify existing build and deploy Ant scripts to deploy the application once all other components such as elements, grammars, etc. are assembled.

This chapter explains what the Standalone Application Builder does and how to use it.

Standalone Application Builder Introduction

The Standalone Application Builder is a utility that deploys a Call Studio application project to a format that is required by VXML Server. It is launched via a batch script named buildApp.bat located in the Call Studio root directory. There is no license required to use this utility.

When launched, the Standalone Application Builder first validates the Call Studio project to ensure it is a valid application, and if successful, deploys the VXML Server version of the application to the destination folder. If there are validation errors, those errors are displayed in the output similar to validation errors that are displayed in Call Studio. The tool only deploys a single application at a time. To deploy multiple applications, the script can be called repeatedly pointing to different projects.

Script Processing

The command-line usage of the Standalone Application Builder is as follows: 

buildApp <project path> <deploy path> [-quiet <log file>] [-debug]

Where:

  • <project path>—The directory in which the Call Studio project to convert resides. This path should point to the location where Call Studio is configured to store application projects. By default, this path is the workspace folder within the eclipse folder.

  • <deploy path>—The directory to deploy the application to. If the Standalone Application Builder is installed on the same machine as VXML Server, you can pass the applications directory of %CVP_HOME%\VXMLServer so that the application is deployed directly to the VXML Server instance. To make the application live, you only need to call the deployApp VXML Server administration script.

  • -quiet <log file> - An optional parameter that is designed to pipe the output the script usually produces into a text file whose name is passed as <log file>. This parameter is useful for scenarios where the Standalone Application Builder is run through from an automated system that does not display data printed to the console. By piping the data to a file, any results can be analyzed later.

  • -debug—An optional parameter that produces additional output to use for debugging purposes should the deployment fail. This option should not be used unless directed to by customer support.

Script Output

The following is how the output of the Standalone Application Builder will look for a successful deployment:

Cisco Unified Call Studio 6.0 (Standalone Application Build Mode)
© 1999-2007 Cisco Systems, Inc.
All rights reserved. Cisco, the Cisco logo, Cisco Systems, and the Cisco Systems
logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its
affiliates in the United States and certain other countries.
Start: Tue Jan 1 11:47:56 EDT 2000
*** Loading project.
*** Validating project ‘MyApp’.
*** Building project ‘MyApp’.
*** Unloading project ‘MyApp’.
*** Done.
End: Tue Jan 1 11:47:58 EDT 2000

The following is the output for a deployment that encounters validation errors:

Cisco Unified Call Studio 6.0 (Standalone Application Build Mode)
© 1999-2007 Cisco Systems, Inc.
All rights reserved. Cisco, the Cisco logo, Cisco Systems, and the Cisco Systems
logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its
affiliates in the United States and certain other countries.
Start: Tue Jan 1 11:47:56 EDT 2000
*** Loading project.
*** Validating project ‘MyApp’.
Error: Project is not valid. Aborting. See details below:
[Start Of Call] Exit States Error: Please connect all the exit states for this element.

User Level Access Control for Call Studio

The administrator can set up access control for Call Studio application users by installing Call Studio in the Program Files directory, thereby preventing users from having write access. Users can then use the created workspace in their user directory to access the Call Studio application.

Steps for the Administrator

Below are the steps to be done by an administrator to enable access control for users:


Note

If you have uninstalled Call Studio application from the Program Files folder, ensure you also navigate to the system Environment Variables to locate and delete the path variable named CS_USER_HOME, as this step is crucial for completely removing all traces of the Call Studio application from your system.

Procedure

Step 1

Install the Call Studio installer file (setup.exe).

Create the necessary folder structure and, during installation, change the default location from C:\Cisco\CallStudio to your desired folder location.

For example: C:\Program Files\Cisco\CallStudio.

Step 2

If Call Studio is installed in C:\Program Files\Cisco\CallStudio, it can be launched directly using the desktop shortcut. In case the Call Studio application is installed in any other location, create a shortcut for the startStudioUser.cmd file located in the %CallStudio% directory.

Ensure that this shortcut for startStudioUser.cmd is available to users so they can easily launch Call Studio.

Steps for the Application Developer User

Below are the steps to be done by the user to launch Call Studio:

Procedure

Step 1

If Call Studio is installed in C:\Program Files\Cisco\CallStudio, it can be launched directly using the desktop shortcut. In case the Call Studio application is installed in any other location, Launch Call Studio using the startStudioUser.cmd shortcut provided by the administrator, or directly launch startStudioUser.cmd file located in the %CallStudio% directory.

Ensure that this shortcut is available to users so they can easily launch Call Studio.

Step 2

The following workspace folder is created and selected by default for users (%user_directory%\Cisco\CallStudio\workspace).

Step 3

To deploy CallStudio applications, change the default deployment location to a desired folder where the user has write privileges.