Bypass feature codes during call

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi,

We have an issue relating to the feature codes during calls. One of the insurance companies we deal with requires us to enter insurance ID’s with letters by pressing *, followed by the key for the letter.

The problem is that asterisk is processing the * as a feature key. So entering *2 for letter A is initiating a transfer in call.
Is there any way to create a feature code to temporarily disable responding to feature codes? So if a user presses *332 before a call, feature codes are disabled until the end of the call?

Thanks for your help.

2

Did you ever find a solution for this? I’m looking for the same thing (and still rummaging through asterisk documentation, forums, blogs, etc).

3

You are responding to a very old thread that doesn’t even have a user associated with it FYI.

You should be able to change the options to your Dial command to not enable DTMF features by excluding options such as ‘tT’ ‘kK’ ‘wW’ ‘zZ’

4

Right, I know about those flags. The issue, which I think I share with the OP, is that the flags are more or less fixed in the dialplan. Most use cases would apply for the (local) calling user. We’re looking for a way to override them on a per-call basis.

A hypothetical example: I make an outbound call to some IVR (suppose they use both * and # in their inputs). At some point, I want to park the call or transfer it to someone else. How can I safely do that?

5

If you know before the call, dial a code that is detected and stripped, but causes the Dial options to be changed.

The difficult case is if the decision is made mid-call.

6

Flags are not fixed, You can specify them.

exten => *332.,1,Set(DIALFLAGS=z)
 same => n,Goto(${CONTEXT},${EXTEN:4},1)

exten => _nxxnxxxxxx,1,NoOP()
 same => n,ExecIf($[${ISNULL(${DIALFLAGS})}]?Set(DIALFLAGS=TKW))
 same => n,Dial(SIP/trunk/${EXTEN},,${DIALFLAGS})
1 Like
7

A call prefix (as illustrated by @johnkiniston [thanks!]) is a good solution. A great solution would be the mid-call option since that is when an ordinary user would be likely to notice that they needed to do it.

Any hints for an approach for mid-call? (I’m an asterisk novice, but a software developer, so I can probably do a lot of figuring out after being pushed in the right direction.)

8

On an outbound call I rarely enable DTMF based call transfers or parking.

Really the only option my users seem to need on a regular basis is call recording and it’s easy to define a prefix key to enable DTMF based recording or to just record the entire call (depending on prefix)

9

In this post, How I set up my feature codes, I describe my final solution, in case anyone is curious.

1 Like
10

Very cool, Thank you for sharing your solution.