[Asterisk-Users] "night" mode ideas

[Steven Critchfield]

On Sun, 2004-11-07 at 12:30 -0800, Tom Lahti wrote:
> Hi all.   I have a system I'm going to build that I have a pretty good idea 
> how I'm going to accomplish this feature, but I was wondering if anyone had 
> a better idea/method since mine seems somewhat "hackish" for some reason I 
> can't explain :)
> 
> The system wants to have different incoming call handling more-or-less 
> based on time of day, but we don't want it to be at some precise UNIX time, 
> but rather under human control, so if people stay late they can keep it in 
> a more appropriate mode.
> 
> What we're looking for is a way for someone on the system to pick up an 
> extension and dial some code that changes the incoming call context, i.e. 
> manually switching incoming call handling.  We want incoming calls to ring 
> extension X->Y->Z in one mode, ring only Z in a second mode, and only take 
> voicemail in a 3rd mode.  Th idea I came up with to solve this was to code 
> a special extension for each mode that used Authenticate() and then 
> System() to copy a different extensions.conf into place and restart 
> Asterisk for each mode.  Restarting seems a bit harsh since it will drop 
> any calls in progress.
> 
> There would also be a cron job that would swap modes if they hadn't been 
> swapped by some time of day.
> 
> Does this sound like a reasonable solution, or do any of the experts (ahem, 
> not me) have a more elegant solution idea?

You can use a include based on time to get your failsafe instead of a
cron. Then you just need to use a global var that your extension logic
could manipulate and a gotoif based on that variable to either short
circuit the dialplan to the desired plan or just do a gotoif to get into
a new context that contains the proper logic.
-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>