Is there a way to know the cause of failure while sending a text message through Twilio

Question

I need to know the cause of failure during sending texts through twilio.

Currently, I do something like this sid = gateway.send(params);

If sid is null I assume that sending failed. Is there a way to know the cause of failure status ?

I saw this : https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/sms#sms-status-values

And reading this, I think it is not possible to know the reason for failure, is it ?

Answer 1

Twilio evangelist here.

So I'm not exactly sure if I understand your question, so I'll give you two possible answers. Both assume you are using the Twilio Java helper library.

1) How do I get the error details when a request to the Twilio REST API fails (eg the API returns a 400 Bad Request response)?

If you make a request to the Twilio API and pass in bad credentials, or bad request parameters, the Java library will throw an exception. You can read more about how to handle exceptions thrown by the Java library here:

https://www.twilio.com/docs/java/install

A list of the errors that Twilio will return is here:

https://www.twilio.com/docs/errors/

2) How to I know if a message that I have asked Twilio to deliver fails to get delivered?

When you call the create method the library will return you an instance of a Message object:

Message sms = messageFactory.create(params);

This basically asked Twilio to send a message to a carrier who will deliver it to a phone. Sometimes we can't get the message to the carrier, and when that happens we set the status of the message to 'Failed'. You can get the status value from the Message object:

http://twilio.github.io/twilio-java/com/twilio/sdk/resource/instance/Message.html

Note that its likely that the initial value of the status parameter may be 'queued'. If thats the case and you still want to be notified if the message failed then I could suggest using the Status Callback feature. This lets you give Twilio a URL that we will request when the message status changes.

Hope that helps.