I haven't don't any nibble bill project so i am not aware of its configuration details but here are some of the feature of mod_nibble (reference to wiki url http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Mod_nibblebill),

Debit credit/cash from accounts real-time
Allow for billing at different rates during a single call
Allow for warning callers when their balance is low (via audio, in-channel)
Allow for disconnecting or re-routing calls when balance is depleted
Allow billing functions listed above to operate with multiple concurrent calls

This means you can have packages where you offer users say X amount of free minutes and when they are all used up, you can start charging cost Y WITHOUT dropping user's call. All you need to do is (reference to JM's reply below),

1. Set X in cash column, and deduct 1 per 60 seconds. If you are billing on different time scale then per minute charges then cash value would be,

Cash = X * 1/T

Where,
X = number of free minutes in package
T = billing interval in minutes

So, if you have 30 free minutes and 30 second billing interval then cash would be 30 x 1/0.5 = 60.

2. After X minutes have passed during a call (i.e. when cash value becomes zero), you can change billing rate to whatever you want to charge user on per minute basis (or whatever your billing interval may be) without dropping the call (but it would be good to warn user about it before you start charging him money).

Lastly using different tables schema for mod_nibble may not be a good idea. I recommend using a standard billing table like mod_nibble already has. You can of course extend this schema to store addition information of your choice OR you can use SQL Views to combine different tables and behave as a single table for any pre-existing reports etc. But do remember that SQL Views are normally Read Only in nearly all modren DBMS.

Thank you.

2009/10/10 João Mesquita <jmesquita@freeswitch.org>

I am testing the latest version of nibblebill so let me see if I can help you with your questions.

jm

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 12:39 AM, Ahmed Munir <ahmedmunir007@gmail.com> wrote:

I want to ask three questions related to mod_nibble bills, as I'm listing down below;

1- Can we select/use dynamic tables for billing using nibble bill?
What do you mean for dynamic tables? Like LCR does that you can specify your own SQL statement to be executed? If that's what you are asking, no, but it would be a nice todo.

2- Can we define more than two tables and attributes in nibblebill.conf.xml?
What else do you want to define and how do you imagine it to behave?

3- As Nibble bill is use to deduct amount of user account, Can we deduct minutes instead of cash? Because my case is, if a user buy a package and I only want to deducts his/her minutes. How we can resolve it by nibble bill? / What other way we can resolve it?
When we say cash on the column, we are really saying just a number that is being deducted, that's it. If you deduct 1 every 60 seconds, you will have your "cash" converted to minutes, won't you?

Kindly advise soon.

--
Regards,

Ahmed Munir

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