We recently had a situation when working with a client where we had an application that would assign work tickets to a customer for work that needed to be performed.

Because our customers are set up with the possibility of having multiple phone numbers, we needed a way when sending a dispatch to an employee for the ticket to include one of the phone numbers.

We were already using BlockUI for a lot of our dialogues so we looked into how to do things this way and found these instructions which helped us formulate a solution.

So, the first thing we needed to do is on the page that we allow the sending of a dispatch was to create an invisible DIV container with the customer phone numbers.  When done, the list will look like this:

<div id="phoneQuestion" style="display:none;"> 
Which Customer Phone Number would you like to assign to this ticket? <br><br>
<table class="scroll" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" border="0">
	<tr>
		<td class="phoneNumber" id="1" data-number="4456" data-type="wireless" data-default="y">4456 (Wireless) <span class="red">Default</span></td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td class="phoneNumber" id="2" data-number="123" data-type="home" data-default="">123 (Home) </td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td class="phoneNumber" id="3" data-number="5440" data-type="wireless" data-default="">5440 (Wireless) </td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td class="phoneNumber" id="4" data-number="789" data-type="fax" data-default="">789 (Fax) </td>
	</tr>
</table>
</div>

This list is easily created with our eRPG program that lists phone numbers and is inserted into the page with a simple server side include statement:

<div id="phoneQuestion" style="display:none;"> 
Which Customer Phone Number would you like to assign to this ticket? <br><br>
<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/l.phn?cstid=/%cstid%/" -->
</div>

Now comes the fun part... the jQuery!  When the user clicks on the Dispatch icon we want to display the select list if there is more than one phone number associated with the customer.

	$('.sendDispatch').off('click').on('click', function(e) {
		
		if ($('.phoneNumber').length > 1) {
			showConfirmWindow('Please Select',$('#phoneQuestion')); 

			$('.phoneNumber').off('click').on("click", function(e){  
				phoneNumber = $(this).data('number');
				$.unblockUI({onUnblock : function(){showDispatchConfirm();}});		
			}); 
		} else {

			if ($('.phoneNumber').length == 1) {
				phoneNumber = $('.phoneNumber').data('number');
			}
			
			showDispatchConfirm();
		}

	});

You'll notice we have a showConfirmWindow() function that really is just a wrapper for a specific BlockUI call:

function showConfirmWindow(title, message) {
	$.blockUI({
		theme : true,
		title : title,
		message : message,
		width : '85%',
		timeout : 0,
		themedCSS : {
			width : '30%',
			top : '30%',
			left : '30%',
			position : 'absolute'
		}
	});	
}

You'll also see a showDispatchConfirm() call which is just a simple Yes/No confirmation window to confirm that the user wants to submit this ticket dispatch. 

Because we assign a class of "phoneNumber" to each phone number in the list we can easily count how many there are using the .length method.  If there is more than one phone number we'll display a list of phone numbers to select from, as shown below:

Once the phone number is selected, that value can be passed onto the dispatch program so when the dispatch request arrives on the employee's mobile device, they will know which phone number to use if they need to contact the customer.

The finished product can be seen here.