[Asterisk-Users] Call parking query

[Alex Brett]

Hi everybody,

I would like to set asterisk up such that to use the call parking 
feature, instead of transferring a call to the extension set up in 
features.conf, you just dial a code (e.g. *3) and this then parks the 
call. The main reason for this is that a number of the phones I use have 
transfer buttons that I can't reprogram to use Asterisk's own transfer 
functions, therefore you don't get the announcement of which extension 
they've been parked onto...

I assumed the way to do this would be the applicationmap in 
features.conf, so I tried various variations on this:

parkcall => 
*3,caller,ParkAndAnnounce,pbx-transfer:PARKED|60|Local/${EXTEN}@internal|internal,${EXTEN},1

The most obvious problem I have had is that ${EXTEN} isn't decoded, I 
couldn't find much documentation on the applicationmap system, so I'm 
guessing there may be some other variable name that would do what I 
want, essentially it wants to be the number of the callee?

If I replaced ${EXTEN} with my extension for testing, it essentially 
worked, pushing *3 would hangup the current connection, and call me back 
then play the extension the user had been parked at, and I could pick 
the call back up etc. However, the timeout feature did not work 
properly, if the call timed out, then in the console I saw an error 
complaining about a default context not existing, and the extension that 
was parked was hung up - I don't know whether this is a problem with the 
ParkAndAnnounce command, or the applicationmap system...

If anybody has any suggestions, or has already implemented something 
similar to this and could tell me how they did it, I'd be very grateful!

Thanks,
Alex Brett
alex.brett at loho.co.uk
http://www.loho.co.uk/