[asterisk-dev] Feature Request - new manager commands - 'getcontexts' and 'getcontext'

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sat, Jun 09, 2007 at 08:27:37PM -0500, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> On Saturday 09 June 2007, Caio Begotti wrote:
> > On 09/06/2007, at 16:57, Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> > > Wouldn't adding these commands defeat the intent of the http server in
> > > Asterisk?  The intent, as I understand it, is to be lightweight, to
> > > shift all
> > > of the complexity of the configuration into the browser, so the
> > > Asterisk
> > > process isn't spending time doing string processing for the manager
> > > interface
> > > (and thus properly spends its time on call processing).
> >
> > I understand that adding new manager commands with *almost* the same
> > behavior is not good at all, but considering that web applications
> > are not that smart and fast when doing big parsings maybe it would
> > help Pari in his task.
> 
> Web applications are plenty smart, as is Pari.  He was asking for an
> architectural opinion about the addition of new commands.
> 
> > If the problem is performance here, as Pari seems to state so, then
> > perhaps it's really necessary to put it inside the manager code to
> > make it fast and specialized instead asking Asterisk for the whole
> > extensions.conf with hundreads of contexts and big contents (yeah,
> > ok) then parsing it all. Anyway, as you said, it isn't necessarly
> > that intensive for a C app :-)
> 
> The problem is absolutely performance, and the problem is that Asterisk
> should be doing other things, especially on the platform for which the GUI
> was developed, which is not a multi-GHz CPU.  Again, we need to reserve
> CPU to call processing, and let the multi-GHz CPU (i.e. in the browser)
> handle the more complicated tasks of parsing the files.
> 
> Pari wrote:
> > getcontext(*new) - returns the content of a particular context
> >    like: action=getcontext&filename=somefile.conf&context=context-1  should
> > return only context-1 [context-1]
> >        exten = s,1,NoOp(line1)
> >        exten = s,2,.....
> 
> One additional problem:  what happens if you have a file, such as iax.conf,
> for which contexts may repeat?  e.g.
> [foo]
> type=user
> ...
> [foo]
> type=peer
> ...

You shouldn't.

The behaviour of Asterisk is not well defined in such a case. This may
easily change from version to version or whatever.

You cound use, e.g. 

[foo]
type=user
...
[foo](+)
host=whatever
...

to add the the existing context. Note that Such context manipulations 
(e.g.: templates) is lost when you write a context from the GUI.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen       
icq#16849755                    jabber:tzafrir at jabber.org
+972-50-7952406           mailto:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com       
http://www.xorcom.com  iax:guest at local.xorcom.com/tzafrir