[asterisk-users] 'dialer' application to trigger call between hardphone and number

[Gordon Henderson]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2008, David fire wrote:

> 2008/12/8 Karl Fife <karlfife at gmail.com>
>
>>  Does anyone know of a small lightweight windows 'dialer' application I
>> can use to trigger a call (via call file or AMI) from any application?  (The
>> call would be placed between the target number, and the preconfigured DN of
>> the hardphone at the user's desk)
>>
>> Ideally a phone number would be 'selected' from within any windows
>> application and the call would be triggered via hotkey, or a right-click
>> menu or by clicking a system tray icon.
>>
>> There are scads of outlook-only options (no thanks), and I've found and
>> tried the Asterisk Dialer 1.0, which I don't like because it depends on
>> Yahoo widgets (heavy) AND it requires nearly as many discreet actions to
>> dial a number as just typing them on the phone itself.
>>
>> Ideal would be something very 'efficient' with at most two or three
>> discreet actions needed to dial-- (i.e. 1:Select, 2:Hotkey--done!)
>>
>> Any ideas?  Any Happy customers?

I did something for a customer some time back - however they had a custom 
written application for making outgoing sales/support type calls - their 
application could reference a URL on a web server in response to an action 
on a number, so it was easy to make it reference a url on the asterisk PBX 
that did:

//      Usage: dx.php?a=1&x=111&y=222&z=333
//      Where   x is the extension number of the desk phone (111)
//              y is the billing extension (222)
//              z is the number to dial. (333)
//              a is optional, and if set to non-zero then it will attempt
//		to make the extension auto-answer.

The code:

<?

   $a = $HTTP_GET_VARS ['a'] ;
   $x = $HTTP_GET_VARS ['x'] ;
   $y = $HTTP_GET_VARS ['y'] ;
   $z = $HTTP_GET_VARS ['z'] ;

   if (empty ($x) || empty ($y) || empty ($z))
     exit ;

   if (empty ($a))
     $chan = "SIP/$x" ;
   else
     $chan = "Local/doDial$x at internal" ;

   $fd = fopen ("/tmp/dialOut.$x", "w") ;

   fwrite ($fd, "Channel: $chan
MaxRetries: 0
WaitTime: 10

Context: internal
Extension: $z
Priority: 1
Callerid: <$y>\n") ;

   fclose ($fd) ;
   system ("/bin/mv /tmp/dialOut.$x /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing/dx.$x") ;
?>

you might need to make sure the outgoing spool directory is writable by 
whatever php is running as...


And a bit on extensions.conf:

;       A few lines to work with the dx.php script. This is executed when
;       the a=1 parameter is passed to the script and is designed to make the
;       target phone answer the call immediately.

exten => _doDialX.,1,Noop(Got to doDial for ${EXTEN:6})
exten => _doDialX.,n,SIPAddHeader(Call-Info: answer-after=0)
exten => _doDialX.,n,Dial(SIP/${EXTEN:6})


; Note: The above works for Grandstream phones.
;       For Snom phones, you may need:
;               SIPAddHeader(Call-Info: <sip:1.2.3.4>\;answer-after=0)
;       where 1.2.3.4 is the IP address of the DSX system


Use it at your own risk ,etc. blah :)


So someone would need to come up with a windows/mac/linux front-end to it 
that poked the URL at the asterisk box - I suspect that's the hard part...

And if a push came to a shove, then it would be trivial to write a web 
page that just took a number in a box and did the same stuff above to 
create the .call file, so it would then be a copy & paste operation...

(actually, this is already in my pbx software, but not many people make 
use of it )-:


Gordon