[asterisk-users] make func_realtime work like app_realtime (1.6)

[Rob Hillis]

Tilghman Lesher wrote:
> On Wednesday 08 October 2008 13:22:25 Rob Hillis wrote:
>   
>> Wesley Haut wrote:
>>     
>>> Yell at me if you will, but I hate func_realtime - it's not very
>>> usable nor is it change-friendly (update your database and your
>>> dialplan completely breaks).
>>>       
>> I agree completely.  As it stands, the REALTIME() function is nearly
>> completely useless.  If Asterisk had better string manipulation
>> functionality, it would be /marginally/ better, though still not much good.
>>
>> A far better approach would be to allow you to specify the specific
>> field you want to retrieve - the same way that you do for a write.
>> /That/ would make the function many times more useful than it currently is.
>>     
>
> What if I made it work with the HASH() dialplan function, similar to how
> func_odbc works?  Keys are column names, values are the associated field
> value

I can't say I'm familiar with this method, but a quick look at "core 
show function HASH" would seem to indicate that it would be much better 
than what we have at the moment.  However, for those occasions where you 
only want to pull one variable out of realtime, I'd still like to have 
the option of specifying one field name to retrieve.

Possibly the most useful method would be to return the single field if a 
field name was specified, otherwise return the array with all values in 
it.  That would allow people to pick the method most suitable for them.