Asterisk: The Future of Telephony

Chapter 6. More Dialplan Concepts

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.

—Alice Kahn

Alrighty. You’ve got the basics of dialplans down, and you’re hoping there’s more to come. Fear not; there is more—much more. If you don’t have the last chapter sorted out yet, please go back and give it another read. We’re building on what we’ve covered so far, and we need you to be comfortable with the material, as we’re about to get into more advanced topics.

Expressions and Variable Manipulation

Before we dive further into dialplans, we need to introduce you to a few tricks that will greatly add to the power you can exercise with your dialplan. These constructs add incredible intelligence to your dialplan, by enabling it to make decisions based on all sorts of different criteria. Put on your thinking cap, and let’s get started.

Basic Expressions

Expressions are combinations of variables, operators, and values that you put together to get a result. An expression can test values, alter strings, or perform mathematical calculations. Let’s say we have a variable called COUNT. In plain English, two expressions using that variable might be "COUNT plus 1” and "COUNT divided by 2.” Each of these expressions has a particular result or value, depending on the value of the given variable.

In Asterisk, expressions always begin with a dollar sign and an opening square bracket and end with a closing square bracket, as shown below:

    $[expression]

Thus, we ...