[asterisk-dev] CDRS and transfer

[Grey Man]

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 3:43 PM, Russell Bryant <russell at digium.com> wrote:
> Grey Man wrote:
>> It's a design bug in Asterisk - it will only produce one CDR per bridged call.
>
> Yeah, it's a design flaw to you, but not to everyone.  Changing the way CDRs
> work always breaks someone's setup ...

There's quite a few of us. We're not requesting new functionality on
the CDRs what we're pointing out is that the CDRs generated by
Asterisk when a transfer occurs are broken whichever way you look at
it. Currently there are people that put in hacks to block transfers or
that put up with incorrect CDRs and lose money. It's not really a
complex situation but is made tougher with the current Asterisk
mechanism of only one CDR per bridged call.

Yes it would probably mean some people's CDR handling would be broken
if it was fixed. For example people that rely on the lastdata field to
try and determine whether a transfer has taken place. However there
are regularly big changes to parts of Asterisk that aren't broken that
break existing user configurations.

>> http://bugs.digium.com/view.php?id=11093
>>
>> A few of us are using a Ghandi style protest to try and get the core
>> Asterisk core developers to take an interest in it :-). Fee free to
>> add your comment to the above bug but the fact that you've posted to
>> the list is great as it brings it to people's attention again.The
>> issue get a post from a new source every two weeks or so.
>
> There is interest.  However, my interest is in getting a completely new system
> developed, which we have people actively working on right now.  Have you read
> anything about Steve's project he started a while ago on CEL (Call Event
> Logging)?  That is the only way that we can accurately log what happens in
> Asterisk, when a bunch of stuff happens in the call.

Yes I have read about it and it sounds like a bit of overkill and
overly complex and that aside it's a new feature rather than a bug
which the CDR problem should be classed as. In my opinion there are
two aspects getting mixed up now: firstly we need accurate CDRs that
reflect the correct end points of every call Asterisk makes, secondly
some people need more detailed logging to know what's going on during
their calls.

The CEL fits the bill for the second point and would help where people
want to track what's going on with a call as it's transferred around
their queue system or comes on and off music on hold etc.

For the first point about the CDRs what's relevant is when the call
end points change as a result of signalling (in SIP's case the initial
INVITE, REFER's and BYE's). I know you've mentioned in the past that
different telecoms switches use CDRs for many and varied purposes but
at the very least it would make sense to have them accurately record
calls.

Regards,

Greyman.