OmTAPI

What is TAPI?

This general information applies both to OmTapi V1 (For older Non-Unicode Versions of Omnis Studio and Omnis Classic) and OmTapi V2. The so called TAPI is an abbreviation (or better: an acronym) for Telephone Application Programming Interface, which was developed together by Intel and Microsoft. It allows applications to access telephone lines, to listen to incoming calls and to make telephone calls from the computer. The greatest advantage of TAPI is, that it abstracts from the particular hardware of the modem, telephone, ISDN card or PBX (Private Branch eXchange) you are using. To be able to use TAPI you must have a TAPI driver installed, which is compatible with your telephone device. TAPI provides a complete set of commands and methods which can be used to access the particular telephone device. And not only this. The current version 3.0 of TAPI also supports IP telephony, standards-based H.323 conferencing and IP multicast conferencing.

Why an Omnis external for TAPI

Like a developer who’s name I unfortunately don’t remember, said: “TAPI is a great example, how a simple thing can be made incredibly complicated.” This is true especially seen from a developer’s point of view. Even in C/C++ it’s not quite easy to deal with TAPI. But in Omnis Studio and much more Omnis 7.x it’s more or less impossible to get TAPI working. The reason must be seen in the way of interface TAPI provides to the user. It is a huge set of Functions and methods which are encapsulated within a Windows DLL called tapi32.dll. Although most DLLs and their functions (the easy ones) can be called from Omnis, the TAPI DLL is an exception, because it uses input/output parameters and data structures which can’t be accessed from within Omnis because they use C-type variable structures or need callback functions in the application. So we decided to provide Omnis developers easy and uncomplicated access to the telephony API by building OmTAPI, a classic style Omnis External which can be used both with Omnis Classic and Omnis Studio. It's a wrapper for all that complicated stuff within TAPI and gives you a set of 14 external commands, which should be sufficient, to do all the common stuff, your customers probably ask you to implement in your application.

What OmTAPI does

In short terms, the external OmTAPI commands allow you to:

Initialize the TAPI interface
Get a list of all TAPI devices installed on a particular system
Retrieve information about each device/line
Select a device/line to be used
Configure a device/line
Configure the system dialing parameters
Make a call on the device/line selected
Monitor the TAPI status messages
Listen to incoming calls on the selected device/line
Retrieve the telephone number of the caller, to identify him by a database search (if the device/line supports this feature and if the caller number is transferred to you)
Answer an incoming call (“pick up” the phone receiver) by click
Log TAPI events to a log file

Known Problems: OmTAPI is based upon the Microsoft TAPI Architecture and so all of it’s drawbacks also apply to OmTAPI. One oft them is using TAPI with Windows Terminal Server (and probably also with Citrix). Please read the Microsoft KnowledgeBase article “TAPI Is Not Terminal Services Aware“. This means we do NOT recommend using OmTAPI on Windows Terminal Server!

Installation Copy omtapi.dll into the xComp folder within the Omnis application folder A text file called “omtapi.txt” containing the serial number followed by a CR/LF has to be placed in the root folder of Omnis where the omnis.exe resides.

Download OmTapi V2

The download file contains the DLLs for 32 and 64 bit, an Omnis Studio demonstration library and the product documentation in PDF format.
The ZIP file ist password protected.
After clicking on the “Start download” button, an E-mail containing the password will be sent to the E-Mail address specified in the form below immediately after downloading.

If sending the E-mail was successful, a download link will appear below the form.

Download OmTapi V 1.2.5.0

The download file contains the 32 Bit DLLs for Omtapi V 1.2.5.0, an Omnis Studio demonstration library and the product documentation in PDF format.
The ZIP file ist password protected.
After clicking on the “Start download” button, an E-mail containing the password will be sent to the E-Mail address specified in the form below immediately after downloading.