[asterisk-dev] Passing AOC information across channels

[Olle E Johansson]

Koopmann, Jan-Peter wrote:
> On Monday, January 30, 2006 4:19 PM Olle E Johansson wrote:
> 
> 
>>What is the difference between AOC and our use of Accountcode in
>>Asterisk? 
> 
> 
> The AOC information tells you the exact cost for the call while the accountcode 
 > specifies where the cost should be charged to in your company. This 
might explain
 > our misunderstanding in bug 6152. There currently seems to be no way 
of storing
 > the AOC information in the CDRs. "Use custom CDRs" does not seem to 
be a valid answer,
 > since there is no way to access the AOC information from within the 
dialplan. At least none I know of. Correct?
> 
No. Custom CDR variables can be anything - the amount of apples, the LCR 
route identifier, the absolutely needed Inter-galactic routing number 
and the Mastercard pin code. They are working in Asterisk 1.2 and svn trunk.

We are moving towards a more dynamic format for CDRs, which means that 
we are very cautios of adding more fields to the fixed formats.

The current problem with custom CDR variables are that the developers of 
the CDR drivers haven't added support for them in the CDR drivers. There 
is no way you can tell the MySQL CDR driver "oh, by the way, please add 
the AOC CDR variable to field #18, thank you and have a cookie on me".
This is needed.

As far as I see it, the problem is that neither of the three AOC codes 
are available from incoming zap calls. The patch that added AOC-E does 
nothing with it at all, so it is not reachable.

 From reading the specs, this is an ETSI standard which seems very 
European (newton's telecom dictionnary claims that it is only used in 
GSM networks). We need to either convince (or pay) Digium (read: mattf) 
to add it or create a patch and submit it to the bug tracker. What is 
needed is taking the AOC and putting it in a channel variable. After 
that we can either store it in the cdr user field or - when it is useful 
- in the CDR variables for storage by the CDR drivers.

Questions:
- Has anyone used AOC on PRI links outside of Europe?
- Anyone that wants to hack zaptel/libpri to fix this?
- Anyone that wants to set up a bounty for paying someone to fix it?

Disclaimer:
I am just trying to figure this out. Don't assume that I know anything 
about AOC :-)

/O