[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Asterisk scheduling controls

[Joe Atzberger]

In the course of integrating Asterisk telephony with Evergreen's
action/trigger notice structure, we have encountered a problem that you may
have already come across, or possibly even solved.  The question is
basically how to schedule call times (on the asterisk side), i.e. start at
9AM, stop at 9PM.

We are generating callfiles that are queued by moving them into the Asterisk
spool directory.  We can tell Asterisk not to call before a certain time by
setting the file's date modified time in the future.  So we have a mechanism
for the "begin" time.  What we don't have is a mechanism to tell asterisk
*not* to call after a given "end" time.  Anything that is in the dialplan
logic itself does not appear suitable because that still processes the
callfile and either succeeds or fails.  What we want is to *not* process the
callfile, deferring it until the next start time.

The reason there has to be a cutoff is that EG might spool up several
thousand calls to fire at the "begin" time, and it is conceivable that not
all calls would be completed by the intended end.

Things we've ruled out:

   - just turning off/on asterisk -- can't do that since local voicemail,
   incoming calls and desktop phones might depend on asterisk
   - trying to adjust callfile date modified time inside dialplan -- doesn't
   work, because the file is still processed, i.e. moved to the "done" dir at
   the end

So are there any solutions you guys have encountered?  This problem is very
similar to print queue management on unix, so there may be products/packages
in that problem-space that would work for us.

--Joe
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://libmail.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-dev/attachments/20091215/c624694b/attachment.htm