[asterisk-dev] Asterisk 1.6 Realtime Database must use ', ' not '|'

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 08:38:10AM -0400, Ward Mundy wrote:
> This is another example of how something that may appear to developers to be
> trivial has enormous negative consequences to those actually using Asterisk
> to do 'real work.' This one change breaks dialplan code for every AGI
> function call. For organizations with elaborate custom dialplans, this is
> expensive to fix particularly if some outside company (that's no longer
> around) wrote their dialplans. What is so difficult about supporting BOTH
> the comma and vertical bar as delimiters? The argument always has been that
> some of these changes were necessary to improve the performance of Asterisk.
> Not sure that holds water this time around.

So let's clarify what was the situation in 1.4 and what has changed in
1.6 .

<Up until 1.4>

Many of us are used to writing in extensions.conf:

  exten => 123456,1,AppFooBar(arg1,arg2,arg3)

But when you look at the result: 'dialplan show context-foo-bar' it
would look like:

  '123456' => 1. AppFooBar(arg1|arg2|arg3)

Thus when processing the dialplan from extensions.conf, asterisk would
silently translate commas to pipes.


People have tons of dialplans that uses commans. Simply dropping this
silent translation would break it. But this over-smart translation
caused all sorts of problem. Not to mention problems doing it properly
(when exactly? Where?)

This has been discussed quite a while ago for long in the devs list IIR
(sorry, can't find a reference) and was eventually decided that the best
alternative would be to both drop the translation and replace pipes with
commas.


IIRC supporting both commas and pipes was difficult. But I don't really
recall why. I'm too lazy to look into this right now.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
icq#16849755              jabber:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
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http://www.xorcom.com  iax:guest at local.xorcom.com/tzafrir