[asterisk-users] Variable Scope Question

[Brent Davidson]

If I have a global variable in my dialplan and I change it, does that 
change immediately take affect for all calls that are active?

Here is my situation.  The company I work for has two office groups that 
share a building.  The two offices are separate companies but support 
one another and want to be able to transfer calls as if they were all on 
the same phone system.  Each company has 4 incoming voice lines and 
calls on those lines should be sent to the appropriate main menu.

As it stands I have a context called internal that defines all of the 
internal extensions for both offices then I have two virtually operator 
contexts, two virtually identical mainmenu contexts and two virtually 
identical admin contexts that allow them to record the appropriate 
mainmenu greetings.

What I'd like to do would be to consolidate the mainmenu and operator 
contexts and create a CompanyA and CompanyB context that sets a variable 
for the appropriate company then jumps into the mainmenu or operator 
context carrying that value so the correct greetings are played and the 
correct operator extension is used.  The variable would need to be one 
that only affects the current call and no others since there is the 
potential to have 4 calls coming in to each office at the same time.

Any ideas on the best way to handle this?

Thanks,
Brent