Example Dialing Rules

In the examples below copy the Phone pattern regular expression and Translation regular expression to the corresponding fields of the Edit Phone Number Dialing Rule dialog in IOC and replace the phone numbers in the patterns with your own.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you copy and paste the rules in the dialing rules edit box in Integrated Office Companion make sure that extra space characters are not accidentally added at the beginning or end of the regular expressions.

About Dialing Rules

Integrated Office Companion makes use of two different kinds of dialing rules: Windows Telephony dialing rules, and user defined dialing rules. These rules can be used together or separately.

As a rule of thumb use Windows Telephony Dialing rules first as they follow dialing plans set forth by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and by the individual countries themselves.

Create your own dialing rules when you need to translate a number for a different reason or when the Windows Telephony Rules do not give the expected results.

Windows Telephony Rules

Microsoft Windows Telephony offers dialing rules which correspond to international dialing rules and location rules the user can configure through Phone and Modem Options in the Control Panel. To use these rules in IOC enable them through the settings dialog on the General tab.

User Defined Rules

In Integrated Office Companion dialing rules can be defined by the user to ensure certain phone numbers are dialed in a specific manner. For example, the phone numbers of your office colleagues are stored in the corporate directory or Outlook Contacts using the full company phone number followed by a phone extension (e.g. (444) 555-6666 x7777). When IOC encounters such a number it starts by dialing the main phone number and, once the call is established, offers the user to dial the extension. Obviously this will not work for calling colleagues on the same phone system. You can change this behavior by creating a dialing rule that forces IOC to just dial the phone extension.

Translating Phone Numbers

Translating a phone number requires 2 regular expressions:

The first one, called the phone pattern regular expression, is used to match the phone number.

The second, called the translation pattern regular expression, is used to substitute part or all of the matched phone number with the dialing rule requirements.

The following table shows a couple of sample translations:

How Dialing Rules are Applied

When rules are applied:

• IOC searches for the first user defined rule that matches the number.
  • If match is not found:
    • If Windows Telephony Rules are not selected:
      • Number is dialed as is.
  • If match is found:
    • Rule is applied and translated number is dialed.
  • Otherwise number is converted to canonical format, asking user for input if necessary.
    • IOC searches for user rule that matches canonical form
      • If match is found:
        • Rule is applied and translated number is dialed.
      • Otherwise Windows Telephony Rules are applied and translated number is dialed.

Help with regular expressions

What are regular expressions

Regular expressions are a rather complex concept. For the purpose of dialing rules in Integrated Office Companion they are used to match phone numbers and modify them. IOC uses the Microsoft .NET regular expression engine.

Bare Essentials

The following sections provide an incomplete reference of regular expression syntax. What is provided is the strict minimum needed for the purpose of matching phone numbers and translating them into a specific dialable form. Please refer to Wikipedia and to the Microsoft .Net Regular Expression reference material for further understanding of regular expressions.

Special Characters

Regular expressions use a number of characters as matching instructions ('.', '-', '+', '*', '?', '(', ')', '[', ']', '{', '}', '|', '$'). If you need to match one of these characters you need to prefix (escape) them with a backslash ('\').

The expression "\(444\) 555-6666" matches the string "(444) 555-6666"

Quantifiers

Character Classes

Grouping

Alternating

Substitution

Find vs Match

Regular expressions can be used to find certain patterns within a string or they can be used to validate that a whole string conforms to a specific pattern. Integrated Office Companion performs a match instead of a find. In this context, it is much easier to write and test dialing rules if the phone pattern starts with the '^' character, which indicates that the following characters must match the beginning of the string, and ends with '$', which indicates that the preceding characters must match the end of the string. As you will see in the examples, all phone pattern regular expressions will follow this design.