[Asterisk-Users] Busy message with call waiting?

[John Todd]

At 4:46 PM -0600 6/13/03, Karl Putland wrote:
>
>On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 16:07, John Todd wrote:
>>  Hmm... this gets quickly back to my long-standing desire to have more
>>  comprehensive call completion codes being handed back by the channels
>>  to the dialplan.
>>
>
>Just a couple of comments.
>
>I agree with jtodd about the call completion codes, but I'd like to put
>this out for some thought as well.
>
>Why is it that Dial is the thing that waits for the call to be
>completed?
>
>Why not have dial just dial, then have applications like WaitForAnswer,
>WaitForDisconnect etc...?
>
>This would give more granularity to the call flow control and allow
>someone to get brave and write a WaitForHuman or whatever.


Hmm... I can't think of too many instances where the functionality of 
the existing Dial application would need to be extended.

Possible results from a Dial:
  - call gets an "Answer", and the pending channel is connected to it
  - call ends with a result code (even if "Answer" this will be the case)

I don't know what you'd want to act upon from within the Dial 
routine.  Perhaps I'm missing some obvious reason, but I just don't 
see it.  The "WaitForAnswer" is taken care of in the existing Dial 
routines, and "WaitForDisconnect" is also handled fairly elegantly 
(by timer or by detection through whatever method the channel uses 
for hangups.)   Can you give this some more illustration?


Slightly different topic, but very much in the same vein:
I _will_ say that I want some way to get Dial to be able to "pause" 
and an extension to be run to change the status of the streams.  This 
would be to do things like allow the called party to press "#", get a 
short spoken menu, and then press "3" to start recording the call, 
then be returned to the party to which they were originally 
connected.  This is just one of a bunch of examples I'd like to be 
able to do with mid-stream actions.  The current "#" for transfer 
(hard-coded) shows that it can probably be done without too much 
effort...
Again, see my notes at 
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2003-April/009890.html


>Or for that matter... since extensions.conf is starting to look like a
>scripting language,  Why not embed a perl or Python interpreter into
>Asterisk to allow for programming extension logic in whatever your
>favorite language is.

Is AGI enough for that, or is it missing features that you're 
thinking of in particular?

JT

>Just some food for though.
>
>--Karl
>
[snip]