Get phone number with twilio conference participant sid

Question

How can I get a conference participant's phone number using the Twilio API? I am using the official Twilio PHP Library.

Answer 1

Hello Twilio Developer Evangelist here.

What you can do is to fetch all active participants with a snippet like this (you can find more details in the docs for the conference participants.

<?php

// Update the path below to your autoload.php,
// see https://getcomposer.org/doc/01-basic-usage.md
require_once '/path/to/vendor/autoload.php';

use Twilio\Rest\Client;

// Find your Account Sid and Auth Token at twilio.com/console
// DANGER! This is insecure. See http://twil.io/secure
$sid    = "ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX";
$token  = "your_auth_token";
$twilio = new Client($sid, $token);

$participants = $twilio->conferences("CFXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX")
                       ->participants
                       ->read(array(), 20);

foreach ($participants as $record) {
    print($record->callSid); 
    // "CAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
} 

Now, when you did this you'll see that the participant record does not include the phone number of the participant. But what it includes is the call_sid. The call sid helps you to identify the caller and retrieve call details.

There you have two options (I described something similar just recently here).

1. Persist the call information when you route callers into the conference

What you could do when you route people into the conference is to persist their numbers and call sids in your application. This way you could have a registry with all the people that entered your conference and access their phone numbers quickly when you need them.

2. Make another API call to get the call details and caller number

When you have the call SID what you can always do is to fetch the call details one by one.

<?php

$call = $twilio->calls("CAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX")
               ->fetch();

print($call->from);

---

The first approach saves you API calls with the cost of maintaining your own persistence layer. The second approach makes more API calls but it is easier to set up.

As always, it depends on the situation.

I hope that helps. :)