[Asterisk-Dev] Web GUI

[Chris Albertson]

--- Jeremy McNamara <jj at nufone.net> wrote:
> John Todd wrote:
> 
> >  Since we seem to be moving the power of the phone system further
> out 
> > into the hands of the users, it does make sense that a Web GUI
> would 
> > allow them to control their own telephony configurations.
> 
> 
> How to you plan to deal with the various stupid things users are
> going 
> to do?  Like a user call forwards their extension to some other 
> extension, but that other extension is already forwarded to the
> user's 
> extension (ie call forwarding loop)
> 
> Every time we've tried to deploy a self-provisioning system we ended
> up 
> with upset customers because THEY blew up their own extension, which 
> just caused the admin to work harder.

You need to do better data validation and simply not LET users
enter stupid configurations.  I would say if a system can be
broken by bad user inputs the system is broken.

Data validation could be done in two steps
1) The the GUI  can do static validation for example, check that
and extension contains all numbers and the number is within
some range.
2) The the config is in a DBMS then you can use "triggers"
and "constraints" to enforce that various rules are followed
and to find errors like "forwarding loops" or forwarding
to the boss' extension.  Modern RDBMSes are more tham
simple record magaers.  Many times you will find that they are
used to enforce bussines rules.

With a text based config you would need code to scan the list
of valid extensions to check if the "forward to" extension exists
but a DBMS system could use a forign key contraint check
by similar methods one could implement a "Don't forward any calles
to my extension" feature without modifying Asterick

Once you go with a database driven system you can leverage things
like an ODBC interface to Open Office or MS Excel for reporting,
grphing call statistics and so on.

I'll go even futher and say that you can't have a web based config
without a DBMS based storage.  Try this experiment:  Get 50 people
have them all bring up the config web page fill out something
and then on the count of "three" everyone hit the "submit"
button at once.  We actually did test web based appllications
this way using 50 or so people all making changes as fast as they
could. and the DBMS makes sure that i.e. you don't accept orders
from companies not on "the list" and that they have pased a
credit check and that their balane is not over due.  We din't
write coed for those checks either, they were constraints in 
the database.

The next step is to build a nice user interface to the DBMS.
A web GUI is one but a voice interactive system would be nice
too.

=====
Chris Albertson
  Home:   310-376-1029  chrisalbertson90278 at yahoo.com
  Cell:   310-990-7550
  Office: 310-336-5189  Christopher.J.Albertson at aero.org
  KG6OMK

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