Custom Contexts

Note: this is a work in progress as of 2007-03-29

Ticket: #1690, Milestone: 2.3

See http://freepbx.org/support/documentation/module-documentation/third-party-unsupported-modules/customcontexts

Architecture

Custom contexts are more like "dial contexts" than #1447.

The idea is that they control what is dialable for a user, or from an IVR or other application.

User dialing

Users are associated with contexts in two fundamental ways:

• A dialing context is assigned to them (eg, a drop-down on the user page)
  • This controls what the user is able to dial when they pick up the phone
• Users can be added to user group contexts
  • This controls who is allowed to dial the user - eg, the dial context assigned to the user doing the dialing has to contain a user group context that contains the user being called.

IVR

IVRs have a drop-down for user group contexts (note: assigning a full dial context here doesn't make sense - DISA is used for accessing external trunks, and accessing feature codes from IVRs doesn't make sense. Any special destinations can be accomplished by using IVR options). This selects which users can be accessed from the IVR.

DISA

Context Types

There are several basic types of contexts:

Dial contexts

• Can contain:
  • User group contexts
  • Route contexts
  • Application contexts
• Time conditions can be assigned to all included contexts

User group contexts

• Contains:
  • users
  • other user groups

Route contexts

• Contains:
  • outbound routes (and their ordering)
    • Time conditions can be assigned
    • Pinsets can be assigned
  • possibly also other route contexts

Application contexts

• Contains:
  • Feature codes

Defaults

By default,

• a route context outbound-allroutes, contains all outbound routes
• A user group context allusers, containing all users
• An application context allapps', containing all feature codes defined
• A dial context from-internal, containing all the above.

These are "special" contexts, and cannot be deleted.

Scenarios

Courtesy phone

A phone in a lobby or reception area, only capable of dialing internal users. Easily accomplished by creating a dial context that only contains user group(s).

Restricted long-distance

Some users are not allowed to make long-distance calls. This is accomplished by first creating a route context that only has local outbound routes, and then creating a dial context that contains that route context.

Limited IVR

A company may wish to have a customer-facing IVR that can only dial sales, tech support, and executives, for example, and not directly access developers, IT staff, conference rooms, lobby phones, etc.

Create a user group context containing the users that can be called, and then in the IVR, set that context as the context for the IVR.