Day / Night Hinting to control Day/Night from a BLF phone key.

custom states is not officially part of 1.4 which is what it is going to take to do this.

I have made a custom patch some time ago for this: see #2273.

I tried it, it works nicely.

Philippe said that custom hinting is not supported inside asterisk 1.4.

Well, that's right, but what is really supported by Digium ? Quite often tickets are closed fastly without support.

Asterisk 1.6 will officialy "support" the custom hinting extension. So FreePBX 2.4 could integrate it, as we are close to the 1.6 release date. This would permitt users in need of it to get it today through the asterisk 1.4 Devstate patch.

I have attached a copy of functions.inc.php that has francesco_r's patch added. This was added to the latest update of the daynight module. By the way, this works as a regular daynight module if you don't have the FUNC_DEVSTATE, so I don't see why it can't be incorporated into FreePBX anyway. It does no harm if asterisk doesn't have FUNC_DEVSTATE, so why not just add it for those who have it compiled under 1.4 or are already using 1.6?

Updated functions.inc.php with Devstate lines added

One reason to not add it yet is that it is not complete. My testing has shows that the state is lost upon Asterisk restarting. This will be an issue for anything that uses func_devstate, e.g. DND, daynight, maybe CF, etc. This means that other changes are needed in the startup process FreePBX uses with Asterisk that will initialize all custom devstates upon startup. This is something that needs to be generalized and we will look at for the next release.

I've just tested this and can't see any lost of states upon asterisk restart, even restarting the phone before asterisk start.

I'm using asterisk 1.4.20.1

I'm using the patch since a couple of monthes without problems.

olivier.

thanks for the feedback - I'll have another look, could be related to an older version of Asterisk but please make sure you do the following when you test:

1. type "core show hints" to confirm the state of the hints
2. stop asterisk completely (amportal stop)
3. unplug the phone
4. start asterisk (amportal start)
5. check the state of the hints "core show hints"
6. power up the phone

When you do that, do the hints show the proper state and does the phone come back up properly with the correct state?

olivier,

looks like you are right and there is just an issue with 'show hints' at least on 1.4.19 which I was testing on. It shows unavailable when Asterisk comes back up however the phone's blf sees the proper hint which is stored in astdb. So this will all be a bit easier to bring up.

I did your test and all is ok.

This should be very interesting as well to implement CF and similar custom hintings.

This avoid to program proprietary XML applications on the phones. Actually, to my knowledge, only Aastra gives free XML applications for Asterisk.

Olivier.

r5863