[asterisk-users] Any reason to *not* use AEL? (Also, MixMonitor q)

[Atis Lezdins]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 5:03 PM, Sherwood McGowan
<sherwood.mcgowan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jay Moore wrote:
>> I am building a new Asterisk server here at the office, and I'm
>> wondering if there are any downsides to creating my dialplan with AEL.
>> It seems more intuitive (to me), but I'm not sure if there are any
>> pitfalls I need to be aware of first.
>>
>> We use this for internal extensions, 8 pots lines, and our answering
>> service which gets about 500 incoming calls a day down our T1.
>>
>> Also, one more quick question too:  Currently I'm using MixMonitor to
>> record incoming calls.  The problem, however, is once calls are
>> transferred, recording stops.  Is it possible to keep recording after a
>> call is transferred, and if so, how?

Look for __TRANSFER_CONTEXT variable.

>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Jay
>>
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> I use AEL in almost everything I do and work a lot with Steve Murphy to
> work out any issues I have found with it. In Asterisk 1.4 AEL is VERY
> solid. The only thing you need to watch for is falling into some basic
> "traps" like calling ${EXTEN} from within a switch (the AEL compiler
> uses sw-xxxx extensions for case instances).  In order to easier see
> what the compiler puts out, I asked Steve to add the -w option to
> AELPARSE which writes a file (extensions.conf.aeldump) which is . much
> easier to read than doing a "dialplan show [context]".

This has been fixed in latest versions of 1.4

Generally AEL is good and nice, I haven't yet been using it alone, I
use aelparse in dump mode to create extensions.conf. This allows me to
check any warnings/errors before actually loading anything in
asterisk. However I plan to switch into pure AEL later.

However there's one suggestion - avoid using "macro" syntax if you
plan to use the same macros from Realtime or AGI. I recently tested
that with 1.6 and it's behavior is changed - so you'll have to change
your AGI and Realtime generation scripts in order for this to work
with 1.6. As developers replied to me, this kind of usage is just "not
supported". Generally - avoid assumptions that dump generated from
AELparse will work on other versions.

Btw, you can also use combination of both, have some part of dialplan
in extensions.conf file and some in AEL.

Regards,
Atis

-- 
Atis Lezdins,
VoIP Project Manager / Developer,
atis at iq-labs.net
Skype: atis.lezdins
Cell Phone: +371 28806004
Cell Phone: +1 800 7300689
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