Product

Fresh off the Wire, Aug 2022

Calling into Video Rooms, SDK Updates, and Must-Read Guides

What’s New in Product?


Call a Video Room with SIP/PSTN

It’s been a minute since we last shared a new feature for Video Conferences, but this month, we released a feature that allows users to call into a videoconference as an audio participant. The SIP/PSTN Inbound feature allows a phone number to be assigned to a video room using the Space UI, LaML, or Relay Rest API. After it is set, an end user can call the phone number to join the video room. You can read the whole walkthrough on implementing this feature with each method in our Powering up Video with Traditional Telecom blog post.


Account Admin Updates


Auto Top-Up

Most SignalWire users are probably aware of the Auto Top-Up feature in their Dashboard, but for those who haven’t seen it, Auto Top-Up is a billing feature that allows you to add a card on file and specify a minimum balance. When your account balance reaches the minimum, your designated card will be automatically charged with the amount you chose. This is especially crucial if you plan on having high volume traffic or traffic occurring during hours you're not monitoring the balance. If your balance hits 0, your services will stop working until you top up your account again. Setting up auto top-up is a great fail-safe to ensure your services continue without interruption.

As of August 10th, any account adding a valid payment method for the first time (meaning there were no existing payment methods on file) has its auto top-up setting enabled with a $10 minimum top-up amount. These accounts that are just adding their first payment method will also not be able to disable auto top-up. SignalWire will enforce auto top-up going forward to minimize instances of outages due to a zero balance. These accounts will still have the ability to modify their preferred top-up amount and associated payment source.

Any account with existing payment methods on file before August 10th will, for the time being, retain the ability to disable or re-enable auto top-up as they wish. You can find more information in our Auto Top-Up Guide.


Final Month to Verify Toll-Free Messaging Traffic!

Since May, we have reminded you monthly about verifying toll-free number messaging traffic. As a final reminder, the grace period for existing unregistered Toll-Free SMS/MMS traffic is ending on September 30th. Any Toll-Free numbers that are not verified by this time will have messaging features disabled, and you will need to go through the Toll-Free Verification process to have messaging re-enabled. Verification is a carrier requirement for Toll-Free message enablement.

Please note that the verification process can take quite some time because of the volume of verification requests to our messaging peer. If you have not already verified your numbers, you may experience a temporary halt to your messaging traffic as you wait for the verification process to complete. Please start this process as soon as possible to keep downtime to a minimum.


See our Toll-Free Verification page for details and the verification form.


Dev Corner


SDK Releases

Managing Metadata

We have added several new methods to manage metadata in a Video room session.

  • roomSession.updateMeta updates the room's metadata only in specified fields. This is different from the existing method setMeta, which replaces the whole metadata object.

  • roomSession.deleteMeta deletes specific keys from the metadata of the current room session.

  • roomSession.updateMemberMeta updates a member's metadata only in specified fields. The existing method setMemberMeta replaces the whole metadata object.

  • roomSession.deleteMemberMeta deletes specific keys from the metadata of the desired member.


These four methods work similarly. Let's look at updateMeta as an example.


Contexts

The new methods addContexts and removeContexts allow users to change the contexts on Voice and Messaging clients created with the Realtime SDK. Contexts are used to segregate messages, calls, tasks, etc. You can associate a group of phone numbers to context A and a different group of numbers to context B. Then, from your code, you can decide whether to receive events (such as incoming calls or messages) only for the numbers in A, only for the numbers in B, or for both.

We set these contexts in the code when we create a new client. With these new methods, you can manage contexts without having to create a whole new client.


Querying Allowed Chat Channels

The new method getAllowedChannels is available to PubSub and Chat namespaces in the JavaScript SDK.

It returns the channels the current token allows you to subscribe to and your permissions for each channel. The return is structured as an object whose keys are the channel names and whose values are the permissions. For example:


You can read the full release notes (including examples of the new methods described above) for Client and Server side SDKs on our GitHub Releases page.


New Guides

  • The technical blog Upgrade Your RELAY Game provides several direct comparison examples of the deprecated RELAY SDK and the new RELAY Realtime SDK that has dominated our Product news over the past couple of months. This is a must-read for customers still looking for guidance on upgrading their code to use the new SDK.

  • Using Video API with React Native demonstrates how to use our Video API within a React Native application (i.e., on mobile, iOS, and Android). It utilizes the new Signalwire-Community React Native library. Getting started with a mobile videoconferencing application is now as easy as copying and pasting a couple of commands.


And Soon…

At the beginning of September, we will release our integrated Chat for Programmable Video Conferences. Development is making great progress with more broadcast functionality, so we hope to announce a comprehensive launch in the near future. We will also continue to focus on Call Fabric this quarter.

See you next month for our fun-filled September Product Update! Same Bat Channel. Different Bat Time.