[dualarrow]

Hi,

I have been trying for some time now to get * to do the following.

Incoming call
SPA answers call but plays back ring (so user thinks the phone has
not been answered yet)
Asterisk rings main exten AND listens for a pin from the calling line

There doesnt seem to be any way to do this. The Dial command doesnt appear to have support for this.

I have tried using a seperate extension to ring (eg 2 extensions to ring simultaniously in the dial command) so that one extension could listen for the DTMF then answer if it recognised it while the other phone continued ringing. No luck here either. The ResponseTimeout doesnt seem to hear the incoming line to respond to it, and if you use the Read command, it answers the call.

Does anyone have any ideas how I might achieve this ?

My reasons for wanting to do this is so I can dial in to * from the PSTN and have * answer the line so I can interrogate it but without making it sound unusual to other callers. I could probably do it with another 2 seconds waiting for DTMF befire passing on the dial to the main line, but that would add another 2 seconds (for a total of about 3 to 4 seconds with the SPA delays) before the main phone would start ringing. This feels like its starting to get too long before the phone would get answered.

Any suggestions would be great.

Regards,
Andrew

[mberlant]

You could record the sound of one or two ringback tones and play that as the IVR greeting for the thread that answers the incoming calls on this line before handing the call off to the real extension you want to ring. Just as you can interrupt any normal greeting in the Automated Attendant, you could enter this "extension number" PIN and be routed to your DISA routine. Unaware callers would think it's a ringback and would be unlikely to press any DTMF keys while this greeting is playing.

It's a little Rube Goldberg, but it should work.

Michael

[muppetmaster]

I don't really understand why you are trying to do it this way. Why not ring, answer, play a greeting asking for the PIN and then collect the digits?

[mberlant]

Apparently, dualarrow wants to keep the feature secret from casual callers.

[sandman]

You can also do this by CLID, meaning that if asterisk sees the appropriate CLID, it can route you to any context in the extensions.conf you like.

So normal users get the normal ring and answer sequence. When I call my home line, the SIPURA passes the unanswered call to the asterisk box and it then routes me to my own routine..my home phone never rings when I call, unless once answered, I press the appropriate numbers to dial the cordless phones.

Not sure if you can identify the numbers allowed to have "special access", if you do, its **very easy** to set this up

[dualarrow]

Thanks for the suggestions. The main reason I want to "hide" the feature is that I suspect most people that were to call me would think it was an answer machine and hang up, or they would get flustered and not know what to do etc. I guess you could play an announcement that you were paging (or whatever) the main line and just let them learn that they have to wait.

CLID would be nice, but in au, we get charged for the service about $6 per month. I'm not that anxious (yet) to have it on for what I see as a convenience, but it would simplify what I'm trying to do.

I'm having a browse through the source files for the app_*.c files (eg Dial command etc) to see what I can make of it.

I dont suppose anyone knows how stable the API is ? Is it likely to change much between versions. I'm asking as my language of preferance is pascal (its been ages since I did any c) and if the api wasnt going to change too much and I could see a solution, then I might be tempted to translate the api to pascal. A very brief play tonight proved I could write an extension and load it into * from a freepascal program, but not much beyond that.

Thanks again for the suggestions,
Andrew

[jmattwood]

Originally Posted by sandman

You can also do this by CLID, meaning that if asterisk sees the appropriate CLID, it can route you to any context in the extensions.conf you like.

So normal users get the normal ring and answer sequence. When I call my home line, the SIPURA passes the unanswered call to the asterisk box and it then routes me to my own routine..my home phone never rings when I call, unless once answered, I press the appropriate numbers to dial the cordless phones.

Not sure if you can identify the numbers allowed to have "special access", if you do, its **very easy** to set this up

You say this is easy! Can you tell me how this is done?

Cheers