Following on from last week’s introduction to Asterisk Call Files, it is time to take our call files to the next level. That of course means building on last week’s tutorial where we explained a basic call file use case and making our example more advanced.
Advanced Asterisk Call Files
In last week’s post, we talked about a few possible use cases for call files and demonstrated how to create a call file for alarming purposes. We also mentioned that call files can be used for batch calling purposes — and that is the focus of todays tutorial. Before we get started, here is just a quick reminder not to configure your call files in the spool directory, but rather somewhere else and then copy them to the spool directory as and when they are needed.
Once again we have taken an example from voip-info.org which we will then modify to suit our purposes:
Channel: Zap/1/1XXXXXXXXXXXX
MaxRetries: 2
RetryTime: 60
WaitTime: 30
Context: callme
Extension: 800Zap refers to the interface to connect to various telephony hardware (ISDN or analog devices) and has since been replaced by DAHDI (Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface). However, as we are focused primarily on SIP, we can simply change this to SIP as shown below:
Channel: SIP/james
MaxRetries: 2
RetryTime: 60
WaitTime: 30
Context: phones
Extension: 100Once initiated, the above call file configuration will connect the channelSIP/james to the context phones in which it will search for the extension number. In our case, the extension number is 100, as that happens to be Mathias’ extension number. In short, the above call file will result in the Asterisk phone system will call James who will then call Mathias.
MaxRetries relates to the number of times the Asterisk phone system will try to call the SIP peer James, so the channel not be answered. The RetryTime relates to the length of time the phone system should for the peer to answer and the WaitTime relates to the length of time the phone system should wait before trying again.
That’s it, your call file is ready. The above may not seem like much, but should you wish to make your call files even more professional, you need only develop a sort of load balancing mechanism which will copy a certain number of files per minute. Next you can simply combine your call files with specific scripts that you have configured in your contexts which will likely be a queue with numerous agents. Lastly, add some CDR records to each of the calls, you will also be able to produce a historical overview of your calling history — which calls were answered, which need to be called again etc etc — and you have a particularly useful dialling tool.
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Until next time — Happy VoIPing!
