Contact presence/status on Lync 2013 SDK shows "Presence unknown" until manual client search

Question

I'm working on an automation service for lync that will automatically add people to an IM conversation based on their availability/lync "presence". It essentially goes down a list, checks who is online, and adds the first person to a call.

The problem I'm getting is that sometimes (usually when lync had to be restarted), it does not always fetch the contact's presence.

First I just had it grab the presence. Then I added code to check for the ContactInformationChanged event firing, but that does not seem to happen unless I go into the app and manually type the alias I'm looking for.

Is there a Refresh() method I'm missing somewhere? Or is there any way to force it to find this? Here's my search methods:

   public Contact GetContact(string emailAddress)
    {
        Contact user;
        lock (ContactLookupCache)
        {
            while (!ContactLookupCache.TryGetValue(emailAddress.ToLower(), out user))
            {
                lock (Client)
                {
                    Client.ContactManager.BeginSearch(emailAddress, this.HandleContactLookup, null);
                }
                Monitor.Wait(ContactLookupCache);
            }
        }
        return user;
    }

 public string GetContactPresenceState(Contact contact)
        {            
            string presenceStatus = contact.GetContactInformation(ContactInformationType.Activity).ToString();
            // see if the status is either "Presence unknown" or "Updating..."
            if (IsUnknownPresenceState(presenceStatus))
            {
                lock (contact)
                {
                    //bug?? This event seems to only fire sometimes when you search on the app for contact details
                    contact.ContactInformationChanged += (object sender, ContactInformationChangedEventArgs e) =>
                    {
                        if (e.ChangedContactInformation.Contains(ContactInformationType.Activity))
                        {
                            lock (contact)
                            {
                                presenceStatus = contact.GetContactInformation(ContactInformationType.Activity).ToString();
                                if(!IsUnknownPresenceState(presenceStatus))
                                    Monitor.PulseAll(contact);
                            }
                        }
                    };
                    Monitor.Wait(contact);
                }
            }
            return presenceStatus;
        }

Also, sorry for the crappy code... I was just trying to get it to work and kept throwing more junk code in hoping something would help.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 24 '14 at 08:58

Could you verify that the code works fine for all the contacts in your contact list and it's just the ones that aren't listed where presence change events aren't raised correctly?

This makes sense to me given you are using the client SDK which will only tell you about events the client is interested in. For example it would be pretty traffic intensive if all 85,000 clients received the presence changes for the other 85,000 clients in a company.

I think you are in the realms of either polling the presence at regular intervals or adding the contacts to the client (perhaps under a relevant group just to keep things tidy).

Failing that you may want to looking into the UCMA SDK which is better suited to centralised services than the client SDK.

Thanks! You're right, the event is only raised for contacts in the list. I now have code that adds to the contact list before I try to get presence information. In addition, I'm looking into rewriting it in the UCMA SDK (since it really does make more sense) — ChrisG, Jul 28 '14 at 23:07

Contact presence/status on Lync 2013 SDK shows "Presence unknown" until manual client search

1 Answers1