[Freeswitch-users] macros for performing repeated dialplan actions?

[Simon J Mudd]

chad at apartmentlines.com (Chad Phillips -- Apartment Lines) writes:

> On Oct 15, 2009, at 11:03 AM, Simon J Mudd wrote:
> 
> > OK. That looks clear. However it doesn't look as if it's possible to
> > pass parameters this way which means that data can only be passed to
> > the "extension" via variables. That works but isn't so clean. I'll
> > check this out further shortly. I'm planning later to pass info like
> > "which gateway to talk to" and perhaps some sort of flag which
> > indicates "record: yes/no", and even include the bridge application
> > into this extension/macro.  That reduces the original dialplan pattern
> > matching to a much simpler and easier to configure setup for me.
> 
> here's a tip from a recovering asterisk user: don't feel like you have  
> to do everything via the dialplan.  this was a constant mantra in  
> asterisk, because calling AGI scripts was expensive.  this is not the  
> case with FreeSWITCH.  the general rule of thumb is: as soon as it  
> gets hard to do in the dialplan, farm it out to a script.  it's the  
> way FreeSWITCH is designed, so don't fight it  ;)

OK. That makes a lot of sense. Perhaps I'm just missing examples to copy
which do some of the things I want to do.

Since there are indications on this list that FreeSWITCH can do many
things the changeover from Asterisk to FreeSWITCH is quite difficult
at least once you start to try and do more complex things.

I've other plans like:

1. choose the cheapest gateway based on some scripts which download
rates from the various gateways web pages and let me compare rates.
Hard partly as the "charges pages" aren't designed to allow me to
match a number to a charge. Shame the VoIP community can't come up
with a common format "charge/rate file" to make this easier.

2. Try one gateway and if that fails try another one. Many of the
gateways I've been using are low cost and don't always work, so to
avoid me having to adjust things each time this might be useful.

3. Remove a lot of the "intelligence" about what to do to a backend
script/program or whatever which decides how to route calls and tells
FreeSWITCH what it decides. This may not scale for a large setup but
for SOHO is never going to be an issue. It also avoids me writing so
many xml configuration files which seems to get spread all over
various places of the conf/ tree.

However I've still got a lot of experimenting to do yet.

Simon