Strip special characters

[iamjoel]

Is "strip special characters" or "phone number validation" still on the roadmap? If so, can anyone from 3CX comment how long it will be before we see it?

I've found several threads that say "validation" would be a feature in v18 (https://www.3cx.com/community/threa...her-characters-from-outbound-caller-id.79082/ and https://www.3cx.com/community/threads/remove-spaces-in-outbound-trunk-rules.64418/), but it's not catching the hyphens people put in their mobile phone number via the user portal. And, the forwarded call fails because it is formatted wrong for the SIP provider.

I'm on v18 "hosted by 3CX".

 

[ChrisC_3CX]

In V18 we indeed have added field validation for various phone number/Caller ID fields on the PBX but I'm afraid the mobile number field for extensions is not one of them. One of the reasons being that when using User Sync with Microsoft 365 integration will have mobile numbers pulled from Microsoft 365 and those values may already contain invalid values and hence cause issues during sync.

 

[iamjoel]

Thanks for your reply, @ChrisC_3CX

I can appreciate the problem you describe. Based on that, perhaps giving us the ability to define "characters to strip" or "permitted characters" (where anything else gets stripped) would solve the problem and make everyone's life easier. Then, everything could be blindly synced from Microsoft 365, and only valid characters (as defined by each customer) would get passed to the trunk provider regardless of what is entered in the user portal or synced from Microsoft 365.

 

[ChrisC_3CX]

I see your point, but for the time being field validation will essentially only prevent the user from applying the settings if the value entered is invalid, it will not "reformat" the number by stripping invalid characters.

Only thing I can suggest now is maybe look through our ideas section to see if anyone else posted this specific behavior as a feature request so that you can upvote it and help push it up the list.

 

[iamjoel]

I'm not seeing anything like it in the "ideas section". Seeing the ability to post ideas is restricted, would you be willing to post this idea so people can react to / upvote it?

 

[iamjoel]

... for the time being field validation will essentially only prevent the user from applying the settings if the value entered is invalid ....

The thing is, the current field validation is not preventing invalid values. A dash or hyphen isn't a valid value, and neither is a <space> as mentioned in the other posts I linked. It's not on the phone keypad. 0 through 9, *, and # are the only values that should be accepted. Anything else is not a valid entry.

 

[ChrisC_3CX]

Seeing the ability to post ideas is restricted, would you be willing to post this idea so people can react to / upvote it?

There indeed are some requirements, to post in the Ideas Section you need a partner status of Gold or above. I'm afraid I cannot but you can always ask another community member or 3CX Partner with the appropriate permissions to post this on your behalf.

The thing is, the current field validation is not preventing invalid values. A dash or hyphen isn't a valid value, and neither is a <space> as mentioned in the other posts I linked. It's not on the phone keypad. 0 through 9, *, and # are the only values that should be accepted. Anything else is not a valid entry.

If you're referring to the Mobile number field specifically then you're right, as there is no validation for special characters for the reasons mentioned previously.

Do bear in mind that we are looking into ways this functionality can be improved upon.