Normalizing phone numbers for TAPI call

In my previous post „make a phone call and respond to incoming calls (TAPI)“ I wrote about the difficulty of normalizing the phone numbers. In this post I will show the used source to do the normalization.

Make a phone call and respond to incoming calls (TAPI)

In one of our ERP/CRM software I get the requirement to make a phone call and to respond to incoming calls (open the contact information and all open offers/invoices from the caller).
I did not have any deeper knowledge about TAPI but one of my colleague found a Delphi component that does the job: hbTAPI (http://www.hbtapi.com/) (thanks to Delphi and to all component developers)
The usage is very simple. Here are the necessary steps:

• add the unit hbTapi to Your uses section
• drop a ThbTapiLine component on Your form/data module
• select a device (You can get a device list from the component hbTapiLine1.DeviceList, so You can set the first device hbTapiLine1.DeviceName := hbTapiLine1.DeviceList[0]; //You have to check the count before!)
• enable the component hbTapiLine1.Active := true;
• to make a call just call the method hbTapiLine1.MakeCall(‚0123456789‘);
• to get informed by an incoming call You have to assign the Event OnCallerID; in this event You get a ThbTapiCall parameter which contains the phone number from the caller (Call.CallerID.Address)

Thats it.
The most difficult task was to „normalize“ the phone numbers between the data stored in my database and the phone system. I will discuss this in a further post.