[asterisk-users] Hide time consuming processed by prompt

[Steve Edwards]

On Tue, 2 Mar 2010, Patrick wrote:

> What I want to achieve is to "hide" time consuming processing by a 
> prompt (load of a customer history), stop the prompt and come back to 
> the dial plan when the information is available. I'm actually using AGI 
> script.

Many moons ago I wrote an AGI (written in C) to do credit card 
authorizations. To "hide" the time it took to send the request and receive 
the response, I created another thread that played "Please wait while your 
card is authorized" while the "main" program did the auth. The response 
was almost always received before the end of the prompt so the "customer 
experience" was that the process was instantaneous.

The biggest trick was remembering that you can't execute any AGI commands 
(like 'verbose') in the mainline until the prompt thread completes.

You can execute XXXs of AGIs written in C in the time it takes to load the 
Perl or PHP interpreter.

-- 
Thanks in advance,
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Edwards       sedwards at sedwards.com      Voice: +1-760-468-3867 PST
Newline                                              Fax: +1-760-731-3000