Applications are the workhorses of the dialplan. Each application performs a specific action on the current channel, such as playing a sound, accepting touch-tone input, dialing a channel, hanging up the call, and so forth. In the previous example, you were introduced to two simple applications: Answer() and Hangup(). You’ll learn more about how these work momentarily. Some applications, such as Answer()and Hangup(), need no other instructions to do their |
jobs. Other applications require additional information. These pieces of information, called arguments, can be passed on to the applications to affect how they perform their actions. To pass arguments to an application, place them between the parentheses that follow the application name, separated by commas. |
Occasionally, you may also see the pipe character (|) being used as a |
separator between arguments, instead of a comma. Feel free to use whichever you prefer. For the examples in this book, we will be using the comma to separate arguments to an application, as the authors pre- fer the look of this syntax. You should be aware, however, that when Asterisk parses the dialplan, it converts any commas in the application arguments to pipes. |
As we build our first dialplan in the next section, you’ll learn to use applications (and their associated arguments) to your advantage. |