[asterisk-users] Large dial plans and variables

[Doug Garstang]

Philipp Kempgen wrote:
> Doug Garstang wrote:
>
>   
>> I have a large dial plan here with over 3000 lines, and several dozen 
>> macros. As it grew, it became apparent that there was some problems.
>>
>> 1. When you pass arguments to a macro in the form of $ARG1, $ARG2 etc, 
>> if that macro calls another macro, and passes arguments like this as 
>> well, you lose the original values.
>>
>> 2. When the macro's 'return' some value, it has to set a channel 
>> variable. If your not careful, this quickly becomes a mess. Some 
>> standard mechanism is needed.
>>
>> In fact, the over all problem is that all channel variables are global 
>> within that channel. Macro's don't have local variables and it makes 
>> programming large dial plans problematic. Even things like loop counters 
>> can get trashed when your inside of a loop, and you jump somewhere else 
>> and modify that loop variable, and jump back.
>>
>> Anyone got any tips on how to manage this? It would be awesome if AEL2 
>> could address this somehow...
>>     
>
> A possible "solution" would be to prefix all variables used
> within a macro with the name of the macro but you really feel
> it's a workaround.
>
> macro do_something( do_something_foo, do_something_bar ) {
>   Set(do_something_i=0);
>   //...
> }
>
> But how nice is ${do_something_i} ?
>
>
> Regards,
>   Philipp
>
>   
Philipp, that's what I've been doing. For readability sake, I normally 
have macro's with long descriptive names, like macro-VMRetrCheckGeneral 
for example. That;s ok until you start suffixing variable names to the 
end. You might end up with:

VMRetrCheckGeneral_new
VMRetrCheckGeneral_old
VMRetrCheckGeneral_i

and so on. I guess it's better than nothing....

I feel that the lack of local macro variables is a big problem for the 
dial plan. Until it's fixed it will hamper the development of large dial 
plans.