Twilio MMS for work order acceptance

Question

I would like to build a work order acceptance system that

• a) converts the pdf of the work order into images (possibly use iText for this)
• b) sends these as attachments to an MMS requesting approval from the recipient
• c) The recipient responds with "yes" or "No" to indicate approval of the work order

I am sure twilio can do b) but I am not sure how to handle c). It is really not a vote. Is this possible using Twilio API - I need to associate the MMS with the workorder & track the response

Answer 1

Twilio evangelist here.

c should be pretty straight forward. When you send your text message out you can persist the phone number you sent it to. When they person replies you can use the parameters sent by Twilio as part of our HTTP request to get their phone number then look that up in your database to see what work order they are replying yes to.

This gets more complex if you want to send multiple work orders to a single person because there is no transparent way to correlate a users reply back to a specific message that you've sent them. In that case you would have to have the user include some other metadata (like an ID) in their reply that tells you which specific work order (of the ones you have sent them) the user is actually replying to.

Hope that helps.