Parking Lot module, BLF, and Asterisk 1.4

FreePBX Development
1

I’ve been thinking a lot about the parking lot module, and modifying the code to add a hint to each parking lot extension (701-709 on my system). Since presence works in asterisk 1.4 just fine with most phones and metermaid isn’t needed anymore in 1.4, I’d like to help with getting hints added to the parking lot feature for those of us using asterisk 1.4.

Id like to make it so every parking lot extension gets a hint added to it, for example, extension 701 using built in BLF parking functionality in asterisk 1.4 (see http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+presence about half way down)

exten => 701,1,ParkedCall(701) exten => 701,hint,park:701@parkedcalls

then adding the appropriate BLF Indicator to my Aastra phones. Is there any interest in this added functionality to the Parking Lot Module? Can I go ahead and get started adding some code in the hopes it will get merged to future versions of FreePBX parking Lot Module? I really don’t want to spend time coding for just me if I’ve got to keep patching the parking lot module every time theres an upgrade. I prefer to make the changes since basically anyone using 1.4 asterisk potentially could benefit for the same reasons metermaid benefits those in asterisk 1.2, only built into freepbx gui…

This would only be relevant for asterisk 1.4. I wouldn’t be able to test or get it working with Metermaid in asterisk 1.2 since I prefer not to patch asterisk to enable BLF / Parking Lot.

2

Sure,

go ahead and add it to the parking module and we can take a look.

Since the metermaid patch adds the hints for you in 1.2, you should implement this such that the 1.4 hints are only added if Asterisk 1.4 (or above) are running. You will want to generate your hints into parking_get_config() which is in functions.inc.php for parking. From there you can figure out which extensions. It is called by retrieve_conf so you can just declare $version or $ingineinfo as a global in your routine to get access to the version info that has already been parsed for you:

$version = $engineinfo['version'];

So if all looks good we can add it to the parking module. Just put it into its own context and add the appropriate include and it should be fine. Put it into a ticket when you have put it together, as a patch file so we can have a look.

Philippe Lindheimer - FreePBX Project Lead
http//freepbx.org - IRC #freepbx

3

r5508 - the donate button is on the left, it takes paypal, and all major credit cards, non-US also…

4

Any updates on this work? Sounds very valuable since phones start to have BLF function built in.

5

it was done back when Philippe posted last for parkig lot version 2.4.0.2. There have been several additional update since that time.