Asterisk: The Future of Telephony

Macros

Macros are a very useful construct designed to avoid repetition in the dialplan. They also help in making changes to the dialplan. To illustrate this point, let’s look at our sample dialplan again. If you remember the changes we made for voicemail, we ended up with the following for John’s extension:

    exten => 101,1,Dial(${JOHN},10,r)
    exten => 101,2,VoiceMail(u101@default)
    exten => 101,102,VoiceMail(b101@default)

Now imagine you have a hundred users on your Asterisk system—setting up the extensions would involve a lot of copying and pasting. Then imagine that you need to make a change to the way your extensions work. That would involve a lot of editing, and you’d be almost certain to have errors.

Instead, you can define a macro that contains a list of steps to take, and then have all of the phone extensions refer to that macro. All you need to change is the macro, and everything in the dialplan that references that macro will change as well.

Tip

If you’re familiar with computer programming, you’ll recognize that macros are similar to subroutines in many modern programming languages. If you’re not familiar with computer programming, don’t worry—we’ll walk you through creating a macro.

The best way to appreciate macros is to see one in action, so let’s move right along.

Defining Macros

For our first macro, let’s take the dialplan logic we used above to set up voicemail for John and turn it into a macro. Then we’ll use the macro to give John and Jane (and the rest of their coworkers) ...