asterisk users - Dec 2012 - How do *you* test your changes to dialplans ruled by GotoIfTime?

This past holiday weekend has resulted in some real groaners when it 
comes to bugs in our dialplan, making obvious the need for some changes 
in our procedures.

First, our hours of operation for Christmas Eve, Christmas, Boxing Day 
and New Year's Eve had changed with little to no notice. Okay, fine, 
whatever, I fix.

Our Christmas Eve hours (made worse by being Monday this year) dialplan 
was broken by me misspelling the correct dialplan to go to. Then our 
Boxing Day dialplan was broken when I copied and pasted the correct 
dialplan from one similar extension number to the other, like this:

; Christmas
; exten => 
YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(9:30-14:00,*,25,dec?ivr-lightspeed-tech-early,s,1)
exten => 
YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(8:00-17:00,*,24,dec?ivr-lightspeed-day,s,1)
exten => 
YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(*,*,25,dec?ivr-lightspeed-after-hours,s,1)
exten => 
YYYY821190,n,GotoIfTime(9:00-18:00,*,26,dec?ivr-lightspeed-day,s,1)


then failed to notice the problem until it was too late. Of course, 
that only applied on Boxing day and couldn't be noticed earlier, either.

I suppose the first problem where I misspelt the dialplan can be solved 
by testing the dialplan in another extension and modifying the time to 
"now + 2 minutes". But how can I avoid stupid errors in the extension 
number, when testing by definition requires that I change the extension 
number to and fro?

This appears to  boil down to "always remember to test it at the time 
that it becomes relevant". But if I was the kind of person who always 
remembered to do things at the right time, then there would never be a 
need for computers to do jobs like this in the first place.

Ernie Dunbar wrote:
> This appears to  boil down to "always remember to test it at the time 
> that it becomes relevant". But if I was the kind of person who always 
> remembered to do things at the right time, then there would never be a 
> need for computers to do jobs like this in the first place. 
I no longer use GotoIfTime for these events.  I do database lookups 
based on date.  At the beginning of each year, our HR department 
releases the holiday schedule and I enter them into the database.

All inbound calls query the database to see if there is a match and jump 
to the appropriate sub-routine.

Doug


-- 
Ben Franklin quote:

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary
Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

The "simplest" way to address this kind of change is to test it a week
(month) or so in advance on your test machine (we have VM's set up to mock
our live machines).  A protection against "last minute" changes is to
have
this kind of thing controlled by variables so you can possibly even avoid
dialplan changes by controlling the variables with an AGI script.
In your case, the dialplan could have been written like this:
; Christmas
Exten => s,1,Set(christday=25)
Exten => s,n,Set(eveday=24)
Exten => s,n,Set(boxday=26)
Exten => s,n,Set(christmon=Dec)
Exten => s,n,set(christopen=9:30)
...
; exten =>
YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(${christopen}-${christclose},*,${christday},${christ
mon}?ivr-lightspeed-tech-early,s,1)
exten =>
YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(${eveopen}-${eveclose},*,${eveday},${christmon}?ivr-
lightspeed-day,s,1)
exten =>
YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(*,*,${christday},${christmon}?ivr-lightspeed-after-h
ours,s,1)
exten =>
YYYY821190,n,GotoIfTime(${boxopen}-${boxclose},*,${boxday},${christmon}?ivr-
lightspeed-day,s,1)

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Ernie Dunbar
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 1:46 PM
To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
Subject: [asterisk-users] How do *you* test your changes to dialplans ruled
by GotoIfTime?

This past holiday weekend has resulted in some real groaners when it comes
to bugs in our dialplan, making obvious the need for some changes in our
procedures.

First, our hours of operation for Christmas Eve, Christmas, Boxing Day and
New Year's Eve had changed with little to no notice. Okay, fine, whatever, I
fix.

Our Christmas Eve hours (made worse by being Monday this year) dialplan was
broken by me misspelling the correct dialplan to go to. Then our Boxing Day
dialplan was broken when I copied and pasted the correct dialplan from one
similar extension number to the other, like this:

; Christmas
; exten =>
YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(9:30-14:00,*,25,dec?ivr-lightspeed-tech-early,s,1)
exten =>
YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(8:00-17:00,*,24,dec?ivr-lightspeed-day,s,1)
exten =>
YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(*,*,25,dec?ivr-lightspeed-after-hours,s,1)
exten =>
YYYY821190,n,GotoIfTime(9:00-18:00,*,26,dec?ivr-lightspeed-day,s,1)


then failed to notice the problem until it was too late. Of course, that
only applied on Boxing day and couldn't be noticed earlier, either.

I suppose the first problem where I misspelt the dialplan can be solved by
testing the dialplan in another extension and modifying the time to "now +
2
minutes". But how can I avoid stupid errors in the extension number, when
testing by definition requires that I change the extension number to and
fro?

This appears to  boil down to "always remember to test it at the time that
it becomes relevant". But if I was the kind of person who always remembered
to do things at the right time, then there would never be a need for
computers to do jobs like this in the first place.


--
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We bypass this problem by storing business hours and holidays in a 
database table.  We use an ODBC call to return whether or not to play 
the "day" or "night" greeting based on the database.  We
also store the
name of a custom greeting file to play.

The database is fairly easy to manipulate with test data.


Mitch

On 12/27/2012 01:46 PM, Ernie Dunbar wrote:
> This past holiday weekend has resulted in some real groaners when it
> comes to bugs in our dialplan, making obvious the need for some changes
> in our procedures.
>
> First, our hours of operation for Christmas Eve, Christmas, Boxing Day
> and New Year's Eve had changed with little to no notice. Okay, fine,
> whatever, I fix.
>
> Our Christmas Eve hours (made worse by being Monday this year) dialplan
> was broken by me misspelling the correct dialplan to go to. Then our
> Boxing Day dialplan was broken when I copied and pasted the correct
> dialplan from one similar extension number to the other, like this:
>
> ; Christmas
> ; exten =>
> YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(9:30-14:00,*,25,dec?ivr-lightspeed-tech-early,s,1)
> exten =>
> YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(8:00-17:00,*,24,dec?ivr-lightspeed-day,s,1)
> exten =>
YYYY821192,n,GotoIfTime(*,*,25,dec?ivr-lightspeed-after-hours,s,1)
> exten =>
> YYYY821190,n,GotoIfTime(9:00-18:00,*,26,dec?ivr-lightspeed-day,s,1)
>
>
> then failed to notice the problem until it was too late. Of course, that
> only applied on Boxing day and couldn't be noticed earlier, either.
>
> I suppose the first problem where I misspelt the dialplan can be solved
> by testing the dialplan in another extension and modifying the time to
> "now + 2 minutes". But how can I avoid stupid errors in the
extension
> number, when testing by definition requires that I change the extension
> number to and fro?
>
> This appears to  boil down to "always remember to test it at the time
> that it becomes relevant". But if I was the kind of person who always
> remembered to do things at the right time, then there would never be a
> need for computers to do jobs like this in the first place.
>
>
> --
> _____________________________________________________________________
> -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com --
> New to Asterisk? Join us for a live introductory webinar every Thurs:
>                http://www.asterisk.org/hello
>
> asterisk-users mailing list
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
>    http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
>

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Ernie Dunbar <maillist at
lightspeed.ca>wrote:
> This past holiday weekend has resulted in some real groaners when it comes
> to bugs in our dialplan, making obvious the need for some changes in our
> procedures.
>
> First, our hours of operation for Christmas Eve, Christmas, Boxing Day and
> New Year's Eve had changed with little to no notice. Okay, fine,
whatever,
> I fix.
>
Boxing day???  Seriously?  There's a holiday for people who beat each other
up?  TIL.

But anyway the best way to test time-based rules is on a VM that has a copy
of your configs, and just change the time.  You can easily run a small VM
to accomodate a copy of your main server on almost any computer.

-- 
Carlos Alvarez
TelEvolve
602-889-3003
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