asterisk users - Oct 2019 - [asterisk-app-dev] Proposed change to External Media API

When we created the External Media addition to ARI we created an
ExternalMedia object to be returned from the channels/externalMedia REST
endpoint.  This object contained the channel object that was created plus
local_address and local_port attributes (which are also in the Channel
variables).  At the time, we thought that creating an ExternalMedia object
would give us more flexibility in the future but as we created the sample
speech to text application, we discovered that it doesn't work so well with
ARI client libraries that a) don't have the ExternalMedia object defined
and/or b) can't promote the embedded channel structure to a first-class
Channel object.

Example:

A common pattern using the node-ari-client is to create a new Channel
object, attach an event handler to it, then call originate on it like so...

chan = ari.channels.Channel();
chan.on('StasisStart', <add chan to bridge>);
chan.originate(...);

With the current ExternalMedia API:

chan = ari.channels.Channel();
chan.on('StasisStart', <add chan to bridge>);
chan.externalMedia(...);

This doesn't work however because the return from channels/externalMedia
isn't a Channel.  It's an ExternalMedia object with an chlld object that
looks like a Channel but has no Channel behavior attached to it.  The event
handler added to chan will never get called and you can't attach handlers
or perform any operations on ExternalMedia.channel because it's just a
plain object, not an instance of Channel.

Realistically, it doesn't make sense to force client library
implementations to create special logic to promote the
ExternalMedia.channel object into an instance of Channel and since External
Media is a new capability anyway, it seems that the least painful solution
is to remove the ExternalMedia object and have channels/externalMedia
return a Channel object directly, just like channels/create and
channels/originate.  As I described above, the only other attributes of
ExternalMedia were the local address and port and they're already available
in the Channel variables anyway.

I would think that this change would make things easier for ARI developers
but I wanted to make sure that you knew about it in advance and had a
chance to comment.  There will be a Gerrit review up for this change later
this morning.

Also...  I mentioned the "sample speech to text application" above. 
It's
working and will be published next week.

Comments?  Questions?

-- 
*George Joseph*
Digium - A Sangoma Company | Software Developer | Software Engineering
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - US
direct/fax: +1 256 428 6012
Check us out at: https://digium.com · https://sangoma.com
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