Virtual TAPI Device

Question

I'm currently building an application that relies heavily on TAPI and allows users to make/receive calls. I was wondering if anyone had a virtual TAPI device or some way of simulating an incoming call, being on hold etc.

If it matters I have using the hbTAPI components for Delphi (Standard Edition).

Answer 1

Unfortunately developing against a simulator won't get you very far due to the nature of TAPI. I know no complete end-to-end simulators.

You can, with a little effort, setup your own simple simulation environment using Microsoft's H.323 Telephony Service provider and two or more computers on a network. There are also several TAPI SIP providers(Terasip,SIPTAPI) available which will let you test against production SIP servers.

I've not seen any TAPI compliant hardware simulators. There's too much variation among vendors to make a TAPI compliant hardware simulator that will give you realistic behavior.

Your best bet is to test against actual hardware and then provide a list of ones you will support to your clients. You can get pretty good results by purchasing some reliable voice modems with good support for Unimodem 5. You can then move up to TAPI compliant PBX equipment from there if that's the direction you're interested in heading.

Also you didn't indicate with version(s) of TAPI you're intending to target. TAPI 2.x requires language bindings to be accessed outside of C/C++ while TAPI 3.x uses COM interfaces but supports a more limited subset of the functionality provided by TAPI 2.x. It also has additional features not available in 2.x. Its not apparent from hbTAPI's documentation whether it supports 3.x or not.

Not all vendors support both APIs so this is a consideration as well.