SMS/MMS Employee Directory on ASP.NET MVC

Use Twilio to accept SMS messages and turn them into queries against a SQL database. This example functions as an Employee Directory where a mobile phone user can send a text message with a partial string of the person's name and it will return their picture and contact information (Email address and Phone number).

Read the full tutorial here

Trying it Out

Prerequisites

1. A Twilio account with a provisioned phone number. (Get a free account here.)
2. Visual Studio 2015 or 2013. (Download the free Community edition here.)
   • Visual Studio Code will not work.

Download and Run the Application

1. First clone this repository which you can do from within Visual Studio, using GitHub Desktop, or from the command line:

   git clone https://github.com/TwilioDevEd/employee-directory-csharp.git
   

2. Open the EmployeeDirectory.sln using Visual Studio and run it. This will restore all the required NuGet packages, build the solution, and launch the default action (/Home/Index) in your web browser.

3. The first time the ASP.NET MVC application loads, Entity Framework will create a new SQLite database in the App_Data folder named Employees.sqlite seeded with data from the seed-data.json file. (Data provided by Marvel. © 2016 MARVEL)

4. The HomeController's Index action will load by default (/Home/Index being the default route). It simply queries the database for the first employee to ensure everything is set up.

5. The Home/Index.cshtml view associated with the HomeController displays the first employee found as well as providing a search box to test the employee directory search by name functionality...

   Type in a name, or partial name, and click the Go button. The Twilio Markup XML response (TwiML) will be returned. (Hint: The database has been seeded with Marvel Universe "employees".)

6. At this point you have the application working. You will notice that the XML response is coming from the /Employee/Lookup route. You will need this in the next section to set up your Twilio webhook.

Receiving SMS Messages in your local development environment

1. You need to connect Twilio to your new /Employee/Lookup service. To do this, you need to make your local IIS Express development web server accessible to Twilio. The easiest way to do this is to use ngrok. Once you've downloaded and unzipped ngrok, create your tunnel like so:

   ngrok http 29103 -host-header="localhost:29103"
   

   Port 29103 is the port assigned to the web project by Visual Studio. You do not need to change it. The host-header parameter is required for IIS Express to allow traffic to your local development site.

2. Test the URL https://*your-ngrok-subdomain*.ngrok.io/ to make sure the tunnel is working correctly. (Be sure your solution in Visual Studio is running.)

3. Login to your Twilio account (or create one if you don't yet have one) and select (or create) a phone number.

4. Scroll down to the Messaging section and set Confure with to URL, the Request URL to: https://*your-ngrok-subdomain*.ngrok.io/Employee/Lookup, select HTTP POST and then click Save.

5. Send a text to your phone number. Twilio will receive your message and forward it to the webhook you configured in the previous step. Your webhook returns the XML response, which Twilio will in turn send back as an MMS message to your phone. You now have an employee directory with no apps or internet access required.

Getting Ready for Production

1. Out of the box, this example uses a SQLite database. Depending on your use case, this may be fine, but many will want to move up to SQL Server. To do this, simply edit the DefaultConnection connection string in the Web.config file to point to a SQL Server. Entity Framework will automatically create the database and schema, along with seeding the database with the Marvel sample data.

   <connectionStrings>
       <!-- Default connection uses SQLite -->
       <add name="DefaultConnection" connectionString="data source=|DataDirectory|\Employees.sqlite" providerName="System.Data.SQLite" />
       <!-- Rename the following to DefaultConnection (and rename the above to something else) to use SQL Server -->
       <add name="DefaultConnectionX" connectionString="Server=YourSqlServeName;Database=Employees;User ID=yourUserName;Password=yourPassword" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
   </connectionStrings>

   Or, even better, if you are using Azure Web Apps, configure your connection string in the Azure Portal.

2. You will likely want to change the App_Data/seed-data.json file, or simply delete it. If the file does not exist, the application will simply initialize an empty database.

3. Create an ETL job or other background service that copies the employee contact information from your HR or other system into the SQL database for this application.

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• No warranty expressed or implied. Software is as is. Diggity.
• MIT License
• Lovingly crafted by Twilio Developer Education.