[Asterisk-Users] What about a higher level configuration language

[Rob Fugina]

On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 14:41:55 -0500, Brian Capouch <brianc at palaver.net> wrote:
> After this topic was discussed a bit at the developer's confab, I got to
> thinking about what a great feature that would be.
> 
> Renumbering priorities is a sadly common task for me in my somewhat
> chaotic config environment, and having a way to "sneak in" actions in
> between existing ones would be a major win.
> 
> Of course, the problem of the hard-coded "priority + 101" situation is
> problematical.  I say we think through what the perfect world would look
> like in this respect and then see how hard it would be to implement. . .

Here I am, just kinda catching up on my email before I have to leave
town for a few days, so I hate to throw out an idea and leave, but I
didn't want to forget the thought, either...

Seems to me that these 'no-answer-timeout' and 'busy' things could be
treated as exceptions...  As it is, using Dial as an example, the
priority n+101 is only taken if it exists.  If it doesn't, life goes
on as if there hadn't been a problem (or hadn't been an exception
handler, see?).

I haven't had time to think this through entirely, but consider the
following (and please forgive the formatting)...

Extension 201
begin {
    LookupCIDName
    begin {
        Dial(...)
    }
    exceptions
        when BUSY then begin {
            }
        when NOANSWER then begin {
            }
}

No time to be more creative at the moment...

Look like a PL/SQL procedure?  Well, yeah...  Could have just as
easily made it look like a Java try/catch...  Once you start working
extension patterns in, it starts looking kinda like a Perl AUTOLOAD
subroutine.  Does it matter what it looks like?  Not at all...  It
does kinda lean more towards a compiled dialplan, it seems.  Don't
know how it's implemented at the moment...

I'll try to put some more thought into this in a few days when I get
back home...

Rob