[asterisk-dev] Re: The New CDR system

[Steven Critchfield]

On Fri, 2007-03-30 at 14:29 -0400, Norman Franke wrote:
> I'd also like a more flexible userfield scheme. This could be  
> somewhat mitigated by having the dialplan command to generate CDR  
> events, but I'd like to allow an arbitrary number of userfields. If  
> none are added via a dialplan, then none get inserted. If you specify  
> two, the CDR record would expect to find two in the database table.  
> Thus, it could grow according to the dialplan users' needs.

Problem with your suggestion is that databases don't like having their
table structure changed while in use. So if you stuck to the current
method of 1 row = 1 call, then you need to stick to a set number of
userfields.

But if I understand the new direction, you could have any number of
events in a call that could be dropped to the CDR subsystem. If these
records could then just support a user variable recording, you could
just cycle through your dialplan variables you are interested in,
dumping what you want to the CDR system. It would then be up to your
reporting tools later to join them or query them for useful information,
but then the DB would be simplified to the point of not careing how many
fields, as they would become rows that could be later rejoined.
-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>