[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Asterisk scheduling controls

[Bill Ott]

Josh Stompro said the following on 12/15/2009 03:06 PM:
> Joe Atzberger wrote:
>> 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
> I'm not at all familiar with the call files, so this is probably not 
> an option, but would it be possible to move all spooled calls out of 
> the call dir at a certain time, except the ones that are currently in 
> use, and move them back in the next start time... Or modify the  date 
> modified time of all the files not currently in use at 9pm every night 
> to be for 9am the next morning. That would cause the system to skip 
> them all until the next morning, right?
>
> As well as set stop and start times, would it be possible to 
> optionally not have the system call a customer while their home 
> library is not open.  That way there would always be staff available 
> at a customers library if they had questions and wanted to call back.  
> Assuming that EG takes into account holidays, it would also keep calls 
> from being placed on holidays also.  This wouldn't work for every 
> location though, so it should probably be a per OU setting.


This is precisely what we do.  We call 
'open-ils.actor.org_unit.closed.retrieve.all' and* 
*'open-ils.actor.org_unit.hours_of_operation.retrieve' to see if the 
library is open on a given day before we queue up the call.

We use an external notification server to place calls for both overdue 
and hold notifications.  see: 
http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS-Contrib/browser/grpl/trunk/patron_notifications

Back to the original question which Doug already commented on.  When we 
first started using this method we tried dumping all of our call files 
into the spool directory at once.  This worked fine in testing with a 
handful of calls, but with hundreds of files, Asterisk choked on them 
and started locking up outgoing lines.


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