Pika Fax in place of SpanDSP

I would love it if in a future release, we can choose the fax app that is used to receive system faxes. SpanDSP is alright with me, but Pika Fax seems to be a nice alternative. After installing Pika Fax, I tried setting up a custom device and mapping it to a custom-pikafax context. Then I edited the context to suite me. I had lots of problems getting that to email properly and to do fax detection consistently on the analog line that will be receiving fax calls and voice calls. Then I stumbled on the easiest way to get it to work, which was to edit extensions.conf (I know, I know!) and replace calls to the rxfax app with pikarxfax and then just use the system fax. Voila, seamlessly integrates and works exactly the same as with SpanDSP.

Now my questions are:
Phillipe, do you think it would be feasable to maybe put a field in General Setting where one would be able to change the fax app call. (i.e. rxfax to pikarxfax)?
and/or
Does anyone know a way of maybe making a call to rxfax invoke pikarxfax, maybe setting up some alias command in Asterisk somehow?

Faxterisk is yet another alternative to SpanDSP that also supports T.38 faxing. It’s application is called by one of these commands in your diaplan: T30faxRX, T38faxRX, T30faxTX, T38faxTX.

Here is a possible solution for picking fax apps. It may be possible for freepbx to do a ‘show applications’ via the cli and filter for any application with ‘fax’ in it to build a dropdown list. That dropdown list could be on the general settings section where the proper application could be selected for use in the fax sending/receiving contexts.

just redefine macro-faxreceive in your extensions_custom.conf file with the version of your choice.

Oh, yeah, that is exactly what I did and it worked great. The only down side is having to remember to go back and apply the fix to extensions.conf any time I update the Core module (like I did today). So this thread is just an idea of how I could picture the functionality added to Freepbx to make it more permanent across updates. Do with it what you will.

With the way that SpanDSP is being developed, I can see the alternatives such as Pikafax and Faxsterisk getting used more.

don’t change it in extensions.conf, redefine it in extensions_custom.conf and it will override extensions.conf for that macro. (Asterisk goes based on the first time it sees it, subsequent overlapping occurrences of the same extensions/priority are ignored.

Gotcha, thanks. that’s interesting.