Learn how to create basic Asterisk dial plan in few minutes

In this article you will find two video tutorials and one real-world dial plan example that will help you to learn the basic concepts of Asterisk dial plan development and show you the easiest and fastest way to build Asterisk dial plan using Visual Dialplan development environment for Asterisk.

Lesson 1 - Basic dial plan elements and your first dial plan: "Hello world" dial plan

[ 1] The dial plan is truly the heart of every Asterisk system. It defines how Asterisk handles inbound and outbound calls.

Everything from voicemail, to conferencing, to voice menus is done through the dial plan. In a nutshell, it consists of a list of instructions or steps that Asterisk will follow. The Asterisk dial plan is specified in the configuration file named extensions.conf.

We'll start with a very simple example. We are going to instruct Asterisk to answer a call, play a sound file, and then hang up. First we will start Visual Dial plan and create new context named Inbound.... click on the image on the left to see how to create Hello world dial plan.

You may also download "Hello World" dialplan created in this lesson here: http://www.apstel.com/products/vdp/samples/Lesson_01.vdp

To use this sample you would need to download Visual Dialplan for Asterisk. Full functional trial version of this software is available for download here:

http://www.apstel.com/download/vdp_prof/

Lesson 2 - Simple Voice Menu, Special extensions, Dial block and Voicemail

[ 2] In this lesson we will modify the "Hello world" dial plan by adding more extensions, then we'll add the "dial" building block to call specified number, and last we'll add a voice mail.

We’ll also add some logic to the dial plan so that it will perform different actions based on input from the user. One of the most important keys to building interactive dial plan is the Back ground building block.

Like Playback it plays recorded sound file, and unlike Playback, when the caller presses a key or series of keys, it interrupts the playback and goes to the extension that corresponds with the pressed keys.

The first thing we'll do is to open the dial plan we created in the first lesson.... click on the image on the left.

You may also download the dialplan created in this lesson here: http://www.apstel.com/products/vdp/samples/Lesson_02.vdp

To use this sample you would need to download Visual Dialplan for Asterisk. Full functional trial version of this software is available for download here:

http://www.apstel.com/download/vdp_prof/

About Visual Dialplan

Visual Dialplan for Asterisk® is modern rapid application development platform for Asterisk dial plan development.
It comes with drag-and-drop visual modeling environment and large component library, handy dial plan samples, powerful validation engine, and single button deployment functionality. It even learns about Asterisk server configuration - Asterisk server configuration reading module connects to the Asterisk server, pools the server configuration data and then pre-populates library components with configuration objects. Visual Dialplan detects remote Asterisk server version and accommodates its behavior accordingly. And there are other cool features like export graphical presentation of the dial plan to image file etc.
Full functional free of charge trial version of Visual Dialplan can be downloaded here:

http://www.apstel.com/download/vdp_prof/

[ 1] The picture should be replaced with embaded youtube movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1j5OrgL1og

[ 2]The picture should be replaced with embaded youtube movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kNYuqOrP3w