Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.2 - Second Edition

Book Image

FreeSWITCH 1.2 - Second Edition

Overview of this book

FreeSWITCH is an open source telephony platform designed to facilitate the creation of voice and chat-driven products, scaling from a soft-phone to a PBX and even up to an enterprise-class soft-switch. It is always exciting to design and build your own telephony system to suit your needs, but the task is time-consuming and involves a lot of technical skill."FreeSWITCH 1.2" comes to your rescue to help you set up a telephony system quickly and securely using FreeSWITCH. It is rich with practical examples and will give you all of the information and skills needed to implement your own PBX system.You will start with a detailed description of the FreeSWITCH system architecture. Thereafter you will receive step-by-step instructions on how to set up basic and advanced features for your telephony platform.The book begins by introducing the architecture and workings of FreeSWITCH before detailing how to plan a telephone system and then moves on to the installation, configuration, and management of a feature-packed PBX. You will learn about maintaining a user directory, XML dial plan, and advanced dial plan concepts, call routing, and the extremely powerful Event Socket. You will finally learn about the online community and history of FreeSWITCH."FreeSWITCH 1.2" is an indispensable tool for novice and expert alike.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
FreeSWITCH 1.2
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Advanced IVR concepts


In addition to important programming constructs such as conditionals and looping, there are other things that are possible by utilizing a scripting language. One of the advanced functions of a really useful IVR is the ability to interact with a third-party database. In some cases, this is a simple web lookup function. In other cases, it involves asking the caller for an account or ID number and a PIN code, and then polling a database. Let's consider simple examples of each method.

Connecting to a database with LuaSQL

The LuaSQL interface implements a simple interface between Lua and a DBMS. (The LuaSQL interface is provided by the Kepler project. More information is available at http://www.keplerproject.org/luasql/.)

Tip

The examples in this section require some working knowledge of databases and the ability to compile LuaSQL, for the target database type to which you will be connecting. It is beyond the scope of this book to describe all the possible installation scenarios...