[Asterisk-Dev] Feature request: reading in parts of config files via URI

[John Todd]

I was working with some global configurations today, and was 
wondering how difficult it would be to include the contents of files 
(or, heck, URLs) to set variables or extensions.  I am pretty sure 
that using the prefix of "local =>" is a bad idea, so I substituted 
"read =>" instead.  It might even be possible that extension logic 
could be read in via the same method, so perhaps using "include =>" 
is not so outrageous if this gets expanded in concept...

In other words, something like these two examples:


[global]
read => file:/etc/asterisk/sitespecific/stuff
.
.
.

[default]
read => http://www.mybigfatserver/companystuff.txt
.
.
.


where /etc/asterisk/sitespecific/stuff looks like this:

PHONE1=SIP/9393
PHONE2=SIP/3111
OUTSIDELINE1=Zap/1
OUTSIDELINE2=Zap/2
ANALOG911=Zap/1



and where  http://www.mybigfatserver/companystuff.txt looks like this:


1234 => _1.,1,Dial(Zap/1,${EXTEN})
1234 => _1.,2,Hangup


In the first example, we're simply reading in global variable names 
which might be site specific.  This would help a lot for 
configuration files that are the same between individual offices as 
far as their logic goes, but there might be different settings for 
each specific site as far as variables go.

The second example includes a small snippet of actual dial plan 
pulled in from the URL (or file, or whatever) specified.  This would 
allow some central admin to change and keep dial plans between 
multiple offices in one repository.  Even using IAX, you still need 
to go twiddle each server remotely.  Perhaps this is just a more 
centralized way of administering Asterisk servers, but I'm already 
running into the "ten million ssh sessions" clutter when doing three 
or four way configuration changes.


PS: A side note on this would be an application that could be called 
to reload Asterisk's dial plan.  In that way, a central administrator 
could cause reloads simply by dialing a number. This is potentially a 
very dangerous tool, but probably pretty useful.

JT