Testing for out of hours call forwarding - twilio

Question

I need to get a call forwarding number in place so that outside of uk office hours all incoming calls redirect to our out of hours service.
I've written this which returns a $status = 'closed';
<?php
// set the timezone
date_default_timezone_set ('Europe/London');
function checkDateValue($val, $args) {
if (($val) >= $args['min'] && ($val) <= $args['max'] ) :
return true;
else :
return false;
endif ;
}
// set min and max valuesfor hours, minutes and seconds - format HH:MM:SS
$hours = array(
'min' => '09:00:00',
'max' => '17:30:00'
);
// set min and max values bwtween 0 nd 6. 0 = sunday
$days = array(
'min' => 1,
'max' => 5
);
// store current time
$currentTime = time();
// test if the current time is in opening hours or is a weekday
$status = 'open';
if (checkDateValue(date('H:i:s', $currentTime), $hours) === false || checkDateValue(date('w', $currentTime), $days) === false) {
$status = 'closed';
}
I'm wondering if there is anything in the the php-sdk or in twiml that can handle conditional dialing based on detecting the time of day and day of the week and that also accounts for current callers timezone.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Twilio developer evangelist here.
There's nothing within Twilio's PHP SDK or TwiML that will do this time detection for you, you will need to write your own method (as you have done) to detect the current time and then use that to return different TwiML to perform the in hours or out of hours response.
So, you could add to your current script something like:
use Twilio\TwiML;
$response = new TwiML;
if ($status == 'closed') {
$response->say("Sorry, the office is closed right now");
} else {
$response->dial($officePhone);
}
echo $response;
I'm not sure why you would need to account for the current caller's time zone, your UK hours won't change if someone calls from France. Perhaps you could comment or update your question with a bit more detail. Otherwise, hope this helps.