[Freeswitch-users] Business/holiday hours routing

[Adam Ford]

Awesome, thanks Andrew, I will have to keep an eye out for that patch.

To continue, last night I decided to tackle the business hours and holiday
routing on my FreeSWITCH system.  It turned out to not be quite as simple
with the XML dialplan as I thought. After being up until 1am banging my head
against the wall, I finally got the results I was after.  I decided I would
share what I tried, why I tried them, and the solution I ended with, in
hopes of helping other newcomers such as myself. 

Goal: To have a single area to modify in order to affect business hours and
holiday routing across all extensions.

Sources: http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Dialplan_XML
	   http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Time_of_Day_routing 
	
http://svn.freeswitch.org/svn/freeswitch/trunk/conf/dialplan/default.xml


After reading the above documentation of time of day routing, my first
thought was that following the main example on
http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Time_of_Day_routing would be wildly
inefficient for me. I didn't want to create 3 extensions for every 1 real
extension, nor did I want to edit each individual extension if there were
adjustments to the hours or holiday schedule. I was filled with hope when I
re-read the top of the default.xml dialplan.  As it implies that I could
simply set a variable at the top of the dialplan that would be accessible to
all following extensions. You veterans immediately realize this is silly,
but that is what is implied to a newcomer reading the top of the default.xml
diaplan. After lots of playing with different ways of trying to get this to
work, I went back and re-read
http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Time_of_Day_routing. The bottom of which
points out why it won't work the way that it is in the default.xml dialplan,
a "classic case of dialplan is parsed all at once."  

My next attempt was to make a catchall extension at the top of default.xml
that would set the ${Status} variable, then pass the originally dial
extension into a transfer application, as suggested by the bottom of the
Time_of_Day_routing wiki page. This obviously didn't work with a catchall,
as it just continued to loop through the catchall. However, it did set the
variable and pass through the dialed extension, so I felt I was on the right
track.   

  <extension name="buisiness_hours">
    <!-- set workdays and business hours here, break=never makes the parser
process the rest of the extension to transfer the call -->
    <condition wday="2-6" hour="7-16" break="never"> 
      <action application="set" data="Status=open"/>
      <anti-action application="set" data="Status=closed"/>
    </condition>
    <condition field="destination_number" expression="^(.*)$">
      <action application="transfer" data="$1 XML default"/>
    </condition>
  </extension>

After trying a few different things with no avail, I realized the catchall
extension would work if I just had it jump contexts on transfer! 

So I moved my catchall to the public.xml, adjusted my OpenZAP context to be
public instead of default (which is apparently the default), and viola
everything worked flawlessly. Now I just had to add the ability to set
${Status} to closed on holidays. There could be better ways of organizing
this, but I just created a holidays directory and included the xml, which
added override conditions for holidays.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

public.xml -
<include>
  <!-- Business Hours -->
  <extension name="buisiness_hours">
    <!-- set workdays and business hours here, break=never makes the parser
always process the rest of the extension to transfer the call -->
    <condition wday="2-6" hour="7-16" break="never">
      <action application="set" data="Status=open"/>
      <anti-action application="set" data="Status=closed"/>
    </condition>
    <!-- include holidays -->
    <X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="include" data="holidays/*.xml"/>
    <condition field="destination_number" expression="^(.*)$">
      <action application="transfer" data="$1 XML default"/>
    </condition>
  </extension>
</include>

----------------------------------------------------------------------

holidays/thanksgiving.xml
<include>
  <!-- Thanksgiving 2009 -->
  <condition mon="11" mday="26-27" break="never">
    <action application="set" data="Status=closed"/>
  </condition>
</include>

----------------------------------------------------------------------

default context extension -
  <!-- IVR - DID 5651, ext6000 -->
  <extension name="5651">
    <condition field="destination_number" expression="^(5651|6000)$"/>
    <condition field="${Status}" expression="^open$">
<!-- Check office open/closed status -->
      <action application="answer"/>
      <action application="sleep" data="1000"/>
      <action application="ivr" data="coral_ivr"/>
<!-- If open transfer to main menu -->
      <anti-action application="ivr" data="coral_after_hours_ivr"/>	<!--
If not open transfer to after hours menu -->
    </condition>
  </extension>

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Call flow breakdown (for those who are new, so you can easily follow what is
going on) -
In this example, if someone calls the DID ending in 5651, the call is
processed by the catchall 'business_hours' extension in the public.xml. The
weekday, and hour of day, is checked and ${Status} set accordingly. The
holiday conditions that were included are then processed, overriding the
${Status}, setting it to 'closed' if today meets the criteria of a holiday.
The call is then transferred to extension 5651, in the default context, of
the XML dialplan. 

In the default context dialplan, extension 5651 is processed, which checks
to see if ${Status} = open. If ${Status}=open is true, the extension passes
the call to the IVR 'coral_ivr'. If ${Status}=open is false, the extension
passes the call to the IVR 'coral_after_hours_ivr'.
 

The catchall in the public context works well for me, because my connection
to the PSTN is direct, through OpenZAP.  I do not have to use the public
context to provide extension security, as the incoming dialed extensions is
limited to my known DIDs. I imagine this is not recommended for those who
use SIP providers, and need the public context to provide internal and
external segregation of your extensions. For these situations, you could
probably create a middle-man context with the business hours logic, in which
to send all transfers from public to default through. 


To those experienced users, if I missed something, and am making this much
more complicated that it needs to be, please let me know. Or if you see
potential errors or problems with my configuration, please let me know. I am
new to this after all.

Thanks all, especially you FreeSWITCH developers/contributors. I love the
clean, efficient, logical design of FreeSWITCH.
-Adam



-----Original Message-----
From: freeswitch-users-bounces at lists.freeswitch.org
[mailto:freeswitch-users-bounces at lists.freeswitch.org] On Behalf Of Andrew
Thompson
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 11:45 PM
To: freeswitch-users at lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] Business/holiday hours routing

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 08:17:46PM -0600, Brian West wrote:
> He's working on it for SVN... I recommended the format and to add the  
> phases of the moon and zodiac signs just for giggles.
>

I'll probably get a patch in this week (or early next) I'm thinking of
changing the format so that "week of month" becomes its own value so you
could compare against mweek as well as wday so thanksgiving + extension
becomes something like <condition mweek="4" wday="5-6" month="11"/>

If I really get ambitious I'd also like to allow wday="mon-fri" so I
don't always forget that days are 1-indexed from sunday :)

Andrew

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