[asterisk-biz] Rates Importer Tool

[Alex Balashov]

On 05/09/2011 08:13 PM, A E [Gmail] wrote:

> Thanks for that. How do you handle the rate updates from your
> suppliers? I've noticed that the harder part is not so much
> importing the initial complete A-Z that the upstream provider gives
> (as hard as that is), but the weird ways that suppliers give out
> the rate updates esp. when they throw in the various
> prefixes/breakout of a destination in a single cell separated by
> dashes or commas or whatever and some give out rate updates one per
> line or some other weird format like prefix ranges.

If the question is as to whether there is an industry-standard data 
interchange format for this type of information, the answer is no. 
Everyone builds rate decks however they want, using the myriad of 
formatting conventions you have discovered, and it is up to the 
end-user to massage them into something usable to them and/or import it.

We provide quite a lot of Perl scripts to customers of our ITSP 
routing and aggregation platform to do this, but at the end of the day 
it really is up to someone to reformat an Excel spreadsheet received 
from a vendor into the CSV format (header names and all) that our 
engine wants.  If it is a major supplier and they issue rate updates 
with some regularity in a consistent format, we often end up 
developing scripts to automate this process of rearranging, but it is 
definitely a vendor-specific one-off.

-- Alex

-- 
Alex Balashov - Principal
Evariste Systems LLC
260 Peachtree Street NW
Suite 2200
Atlanta, GA 30303
Tel: +1-678-954-0670
Fax: +1-404-961-1892
Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/