[asterisk-users] Asterisk Realtime Billing Question???

[Tarek Sawah]

If you look at it the way you want it.. you usually tell your customer the
available funds and minutes in their account right?
How will you explain "politely" that you have dropped their calls for lack
of balance because someone else used their account?
If you don't tell them their balance and call duration before call .. then
that won't be a problem. 
Now you can do some kind of script to do the math and disconnect calls when
balance is over.

From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of DHAVAL
INDRODIYA
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2010 9:31 AM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] Asterisk Realtime Billing Question???

Hi Sherwood ,

well , i think you did not understand my question , i want real time billing
like as i mentioned that if i want to dial 5 number with different call rate
how can i access same 
balance into those 5 people, if all are connected how can i periodically
update billing , as you suggested it will assign total balance to those 5
people but actually we can not do like this as total balance of user $100 ,
as per your suggestion it will give $100 for those 5 people which is
practically wrong i think. 

give your thougts.

regards
dhaval
On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 11:44 AM, Sherwood McGowan
<sherwood.mcgowan at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 12:24 AM, DHAVAL INDRODIYA
<dhaval.it01034 at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello All,

after so long time i posted a new question regarding billing, hope  anyone
have some solution.

I have situation in that i want to do billing of more than 1 call in real
time below are scenario and explanation. 


Scenario:
 A customer called my DID number and after that from here i dial few number
let say 5 number. once number are placed into DIAL
i will put this customer into conference [MEETME] , once a Members are
picked up call they will also patched into conference and 
talking is started, every thing working fine with DIAL-PLAN and DB look up. 

Now, i want to do billing on customer dialed my DID, and from that actually
it DIALED 5 numbers, how can i DO real time billing 
into this situation, like numbers can be different It can be ISD,STD,Local
and also free .

if customer having initial balance of $100 then how can i check balance
every time.in a situation once balance is nil then i want to disconnect 
calls . is any one facing this type of situation.

give me some  idea ,

regards
Dhaval

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Dhaval,
This sounds very much like a system I'm working on for a client right now.
I'm not permitted to disclose much about it due to the NDA i signed, but
I'll risk giving you a point in the right direction. 

First, you should create a table in your database that has a column called
callid, and other columns that you will have to decide upon. This table will
be called something like 'call_references'. Oh, and you'll want to define
callid as the primary key for records in that table, but DO NOT make it an
autoincrement, you're going to populate it with a value that is described in
the next step.

Second, at the beginning of the original call you mentioned, define a
variable that will be unique to that call. I personally have done this by
stripping all non-digits from the caller's callerid (using
Set(newcid=${FILTER(0123456789,${CALLERID(number)})} ), and then adding the
to ${EPOCH}. I did it this way: ${MATH(${newcid}+${EPOCH})}. 

Next (this is where I have to start being a bit vague), you're going to
perform an INSERT query, creating a new call_references record (using that
variable I just showed you how to construct as callid's value). 

Now, when you defined that variable, you should have preceded the variable
name with two underscores ( __ ), which will tell Asterisk that channels
spawned by the current channel will inherit that variable and it's value. 

Voila, you now have a method for storing realtime data such as billing
information between MULTIPLE calls. 

I wish I could tell you more, but I can't violate my client's Non-Disclosure
Agreement.

Hope this helps you out!

Sherwood McGowan


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