[asterisk-biz] Rates Importer Tool

[A E [Gmail]]

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 8:18 PM, Alex Balashov <abalashov at evaristesys.com>wrote:

> 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
>
> Hi Alex,
Sure, like I said, not expecting to be spoon-fed, just trying to reduce the
dev. time by taking existing code / scripts etc from anyone who's willing to
share and tweak them to make it work for the carriers we end up getting our
rates from, as well as then converting them into some format/template that
we choose to feed into our rating/routing engine. Incidentally, we're
planning to buy only from the larger/major suppliers and are hoping that
someone would've the templates/scripts to normalize those suppliers' rate
decks and that they'd be willing to share them :)
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