Hotel Style Wakeup Calls

tshif wrote:

Certain long term hotels and other applications would enjoy having recurring reminders added to the system capabilties.

Are you talking about multiple entities with individual times (say, a 6am wakeup call and a noon wakeup call) or a single entity that has a repeating schedule (say, a 6am wakeup call that repeats every day)? The first one will be much harder to implement from a user-interface standpoint. The second one would be fairly easy.

One approach is to store information about calls in the database and have some sort of mechanism that extracts that day's calls to the outdoing directory. This would require having the install script drop a job into Asterisk's crontab file, for instance, to run each day at, say midnight. This job parses the database for all the extensions and times for potential calls over the next 24 hours and populates /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing appropriately. The wakephp script needs to be updated (in this case) to add appropriate meta information about the wakeup call to the database, but it still only needs to drop the next call into the outgoing directory.

This sets the stage for someone to call on Monday to set a wakeup call for Wednesday and have it repeat through Friday, for instance. It also sets the stage to have weirder things in place as well.

The request came in as a single request that has repeating schedule.
The cron task can be done - it actually goes into a table for FreePBX Cronmanager table. That's handled in the module installer.

I thinks its worthwhile to begin to flesh it out. You feel like taking point for this one?

DO you have any of the weirder things to suggest for v1 of the new functions?

tshif wrote:

The request came in as a single request that has repeating schedule.

Great. Much easier, and I'm a good ways down a road for a solution to that. :-)

The cron task can be done - it actually goes into a table for FreePBX Cronmanager table. That's handled in the module installer.

Yes, I've already updated my svn working copy to do just that.

I thinks its worthwhile to begin to flesh it out. You feel like taking point for this one?

I guess I already did that, since I've started working on figuring out how to implement it. :-)

DO you have any of the weirder things to suggest for v1 of the new functions?

Just off the top of my head... You could have an operator-based wakeup call that calls a range of extensions, for instance. Or specifying custom sound files for each call. Maybe useful when you're at summer camp or when an "extension" is actually a SIP speaker like some we've installed in schools. This would be a quick-n-dirty way to implement period bell/buzzer notifiers, for instance.

Ok - sounds good to me. After you have done some assessment, lets talk and review the exact feature set planned.

I can see some of the more extended capabilities you discussed (paging, simple school bell system, etc.) being truly worthwhile - and not far from currently planned extended functionality. BUT we should assess it for a separate module as well, where we could better separate and address its flexibilities. A portion of the code base could be shared if we desire it.

Moved to Hotel Wake Up Calls 1.3.0 Time Line.
This feature is under active development.

Can I do anything to assist in this case?

You can put more hours in the day or fewer bills in the mailbox. :-)

Seriously, today (the last day of the second quarter) is a critical day for me, and then I'm out for the holiday weekend. I'll be able to return to this in early July.

tshif wrote:

Can I do anything to assist in this case?

bitnetix - still considering working this upgrade?