[asterisk-users] How do *you* test your changes to dialplans ruled by GotoIfTime?

[Mitch Claborn]

We bypass this problem by storing business hours and holidays in a 
database table.  We use an ODBC call to return whether or not to play 
the "day" or "night" greeting based on the database.  We also store the 
name of a custom greeting file to play.

The database is fairly easy to manipulate with test data.


Mitch

On 12/27/2012 01:46 PM, Ernie Dunbar wrote:
> This past holiday weekend has resulted in some real groaners when it
> comes to bugs in our dialplan, making obvious the need for some changes
> in our procedures.
>
> First, our hours of operation for Christmas Eve, Christmas, Boxing Day
> and New Year's Eve had changed with little to no notice. Okay, fine,
> whatever, I fix.
>
> Our Christmas Eve hours (made worse by being Monday this year) dialplan
> was broken by me misspelling the correct dialplan to go to. Then our
> Boxing Day dialplan was broken when I copied and pasted the correct
> dialplan from one similar extension number to the other, like this:
>
> ; Christmas
> ; exten =>
> YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(9:30-14:00,*,25,dec?ivr-lightspeed-tech-early,s,1)
> exten =>
> YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(8:00-17:00,*,24,dec?ivr-lightspeed-day,s,1)
> exten => YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(*,*,25,dec?ivr-lightspeed-after-hours,s,1)
> exten =>
> YYYY821190,n,GotoIfTime(9:00-18:00,*,26,dec?ivr-lightspeed-day,s,1)
>
>
> then failed to notice the problem until it was too late. Of course, that
> only applied on Boxing day and couldn't be noticed earlier, either.
>
> I suppose the first problem where I misspelt the dialplan can be solved
> by testing the dialplan in another extension and modifying the time to
> "now + 2 minutes". But how can I avoid stupid errors in the extension
> number, when testing by definition requires that I change the extension
> number to and fro?
>
> This appears to  boil down to "always remember to test it at the time
> that it becomes relevant". But if I was the kind of person who always
> remembered to do things at the right time, then there would never be a
> need for computers to do jobs like this in the first place.
>
>
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