SIP MESSAGE and connected call

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

I’ve been in the process of writing a flash frontend for our call center to use with our current VOIP setup, which uses Asterisk 1.6.2.18 currently. This app allows the user to transfer a currently connected call to another user, and send a message to that user alerting them as to a reason for the transfer, or other useful details about the call.

The transfer works part works fine, but the MESSAGE send keeps coming back with “Received message to %s from %s, dropped it…”. In the specs at asterisk.sourcearchive.com for static void receive_message() {} in chan_sip.c it says that to send a MESSAGE that a call must be connected (/* Message outside of a call, we do not support that */). Does this mean that the user sending the MESSAGE must be connected in a call to the person receiving the MESSAGE, or just that the person receiving the MESSAGE has to be in any call?

I was wondering if there’s any plan to change that so one can send a message without having to be connected, or if this would violate the spec and simply can’t be implemented? The problem is that my flash app has no way to know whether the user receiving the transfer has accepted or declined the call, and therefore it sends the MESSAGE right after the transfer command.

2

In the security fixes only branch that you are using, SIP text messages can only be used in the context of the call between sender and receiver.

I believe this limitation may have been removed in one or both of the currently supported branches, but I haven’t used this myself.

3

Can you be more specific? Is there a branch of 1.6 that is not the ‘security fixes only branch’ you mention?

4

No. The whole of 1.6 is end of life, although you don’t have the final version, so you will be short of some security fixes. Out of dialogue messages will never be supported in 1.6.x. 1.6.0 and 1.6.1 are completely end of life. 1.6.2 is security fixes only.

I meant 1.8 or 10.x

5

Ah, thanks for clarifying. I am not sure if we can use 1.8 with our setup but my boss (the one who actually sets these up) will look into it. Thanks again.