Through the past number of months in my full-time developer position for an online company and it's sales office, we've migrated to a VOIP telephony platform based on Asterisk, Linux and our custom call centre management application.
In order to integrate an autodialer in to the application, I had originally written a script in PHP to read from two asterisk servers (local and offshore) to post information about whether an agent is on a call or not, and also inbound calls to the call centre application.
The PHP script took a matter of hours to set up initially, but lacked proper structure - specifically, it could not track information when we switched to call queues, and was not easily portable between asterisk versions (1.8 locally, 1.2 in offshore)
For the past week I have worked on the design and initial coding of an app in C++ that acts as a client to both servers, interprets the messages and creates internal structures. I'm releasing that code here for review, and to help other's save some time, as I haven't noticed any other software out there that could accomplish this elegantly. Currently, I am calling this application AMIflex based on the flexibility it provides to manage the Asterisk AMI protocol.
This source code and it's derivatives can not be sold, licensed or packaged with any commercial software without my explicit permission.Download the source code here (.tar.bz2, 6kb)Installation instructions:
- unpack the file via "tar -xvjf" command
- create /etc/amiflex directory, and add a "servers.conf" file in the following format
Server: server name (for display purposes only)
Host: ip address or host name of ami server
Username: AMI manager username
Secret: AMI manager password/secret
Optional fields:
RetryPeriod: number of seconds to wait between connection retries - ie if asterisk is rebooted (default: 300)
Port: port number (default 5038)
You can insert more than one server (connections will be maintained together) by entering the first server's details, placing a second new line after the last configration line for that server, and then entering the details for the second server (and so on)
How to make this useful
When a server connection is established, there's a AMI::RegisterAllEvents() call after authentication. Add in your own events, and manipulate the structures or log output
Example:
AMI::RegisterEventCB("Dial", &AMI::MyDialCallback)
void AMI::MyDialCallback(MSG *msg)
{
if (msg->Attr("SubEvent").value=="Begin")
cout << msg->Attr("Channel").value + " is dialing " +msg->Attr("Dialstring").value<<endl;
}
Current limitations
I have some well known limitations with this software - I'll be resolving them myself for internal use, but my next step is to integrate proprietary MySQL links in to the source code, so I made sure to release this first. Currently my task list with my employer is too long to not take some shortcuts :)
- The channel list linked list is a static member of the channel class - this means that you run AMIflex with multiple servers in the configuration file, all of the channels for all servers will be parallel. If you have two servers and each server has the same extension, then there will be one device entry created and two channels open on that device, when each extension is busy.
- The bridge event currently only registered the first channel's Bridge member to the second member, and vice versa - If you are monitoring channels that will be bridged to more than one other channel, this will have to be expanded to a proper many to many-style linked list.