[asterisk-dev] Methodologies for validating dialplan

[Steve Edwards]

On Tue, 4 Jan 2022, Nikša Baldun wrote:

> I apologize for not commenting on the actual issue. However, after 
> having the experience of writing a complex dialplan, I feel strongly 
> compelled to say that it shouldn't be done at all. Any non-trivial call 
> flow should be written in Fast AGI. I can't see any upside of using 
> extensions.conf or AEL. Using a real programming language is 
> considerably easier, faster and more powerful, all the necessary tools 
> already exist and most importantly, execution is significantly faster. 
> In my case, after rewriting my dialplan in Python, call preparation time 
> fell from 2.5 seconds to a mere 50 milliseconds.

+1

Although, if you write your AGIs in a compiled language, a mix of dialplan 
and AGI is performant. One of my dialplans invokes a half dozen AGIs 
before the first prompt and nobody has ever complained about a delay.

An Asterisk lint / validator would be a good 'pre-flight' check before 
pushing out to production.

My first thought was that it should be an external tool, but a couple of 
my recent dialplans have been in AEL so maybe an internal tool does make 
sense.

Unfortunately, I do [ab]use channel variables extensively. Some of my 
dialplans create thousands of channel variables per call. Almost every 
sound file reference has at least 1 channel variable. Some variable 
references have nested variable names like:

         set(PER-MINUTE=${PRODUCT-${EXTEN}-PER-MINUTE})

and

         goto(${PRODUCT-${EXTEN}-APPLICATION},s,1)

-- 
Thanks in advance,
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Edwards       sedwards at sedwards.com      Voice: +1-760-468-3867 PST
             https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-edwards-4244281