SKYPE incoming call monitor

[jdtoronto]

Esteemed Monks,

My Win32 Perl/Tk application needs to monitor Skype and when an incoming call is received it needs to get the PSTN_NUMBER or the USERNAME of the caller from the API.

I have the API reference document and the ActiveS COM wrapper which has been suggested as necessary, but beyond the fact that I recognise the name pf the product the rest of it is like magic to me. The onyl sample Perl code I have seen for Skype gives me no clue as to how I could go about getting the info I need.

What am I missing? (apart from a brain that is!) Can anyone help with sample code or even some advice please.

jdtoronto

[spiritway]

Could you point us to the API reference, or the sample Perl code for Skype? Someone with more experience (who probably isn't me) might be able to offer some helpful comments, if they could see the actual code.

[virtualsue]

Out of interest, I went looking and I found this: WorkingWithTheSkypeAPI.pdf, from skype journal.

[davido]

You probably already noticed, but I thought I would mention for others' benefit: that article does contain a section with an example written in Perl of accessing the Skype API under Windows. It's unfortunately cluttered with Tk stuff, but that's transparent enough that you can still learn a lot from the code. Examples are given in other languages too, which may be helpful for some people.

[jdtoronto]

Esteemed colleagues,

In my usual rush I came here and added a bundle of info, previewed it and forgot to post it! I have done some more work and have the following to report which hopefully may enable some of the more experienced amongst the monastrians to be able to help me some more.

The link from virtualsue to the SkypeJournal material points to an extremely simplistic application where, as is noted, the Tk shrouds the Perl guts. And the Perl guts is almost inconsequential.

use strict;
use warnings;

use Win32::OLE qw(in);
.
.
my objskype - Win32::OLE->new('SKYPEAPI.Access'. 'objSkype_');

$objSkype->SendMessage( $targethandle, $message );

Which simply sends a chat message to the specified target. The ActiveS COM wrapper ( http://www.khaoslabs.com/actives.php ) offer no more information. An email to the author elicited the response that he knew absolutely nothing about Perl. So I hacked away and finally started to get something back from the API. This rudimentary caode:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;
use Win32::OLE qw(in valof with);
my $objskype = Win32::OLE->new('SKYPEAPI.Access');
my $ex = $objskype->GetCallList();

foreach my $key ( keys( %$ex)) {
  print( $key, "\n");
}

foreach my $value (in $ex) {
  print "$value->{ID} : $value->{STATUS} : $value->{PSTN_NUMBER}\n";
}

Gets the following:

skt.pl
Count
Item
1165 : 11 : +647723xxxx
1216 : 7 : +1416778xxxx

If I were to run code like this in a polling loop I could get the info I need, but with an overhead! Having got this far, can anyone tell me where to find information on handling EVENTS with Win32::OLE?

The documenation for the wrapper gives a list of events, but nothing more.

jdtoronto