Hi folks,
You may recall that I sent an e-mail [1] out about a month ago saying
that I was working on implementing some new ARI methods for Asterisk 14
that would allow for bridging calls early, the idea being that this
would allow for situations like allowing early media to be bridged to
callers. What I have created so far are two new ARI methods: one that
creates a new channel, and a second that dials that channel. You are
free to place the newly created channel into a bridge and then dial it,
or you can create the channel, dial it, and then add it to the bridge
based on some channel state change (like if it starts ringing). I've got
basic operations working really well right now, and now I'm
investigating the more interesting corners of the feature.
This has led me to an issue regarding call forwarding. In the interest
of brevity, I'll just say that call forwarding does not play well with
ARI's threading when it comes to bridged channels. I fear that
attempting to handle call forwards automatically within Asterisk will
require jumping through some hoops resulting in the potential for errors
to occur.
I would like to propose a solution to this. Instead of having Asterisk
automatically handle call forwards when performing an ARI dial, raise an
event stating "Outbound channel X wants to forward the call to Y". This
way, the ARI application writer can act on this event as desired. You
can ignore the call forward attempt altogether. You can look up who Y is
and forward the call manually. You can check some presence database and
forward to Y's voicemail instead of Y. You can say "screw you X" and
forward the call to Z instead.
The upsides to this are that
1) It places the ARI author in complete control of the destination of
the call. Automatic behavior from Asterisk is limited, and there will be
no surprises.
2) By always dialing outbound calls from the ARI application, we can
assure that channels are being tracked as expected and there are no
hoops that we have to jump through internally to ensure that everything
is set up properly.
The big downside I can think of is that the current ARI originate
command does automatically perform call forwards. This would introduce
an inconsistency in the behaviors of the two methods of making outbound
calls.
What is the list's opinion on the proposal for handling call forwards in
the new ARI dial command?
Thank you very much,
Mark Michelson
[1]
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-app-dev/2016-March/000769.html
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