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Key concepts
Hierarchical structures
Hierarchical structure definitions (tree-like) are preferred respect flat definitions
(list-like):
- Customers are defined using hierarchical structures, for example “Acme Organization/Accounting Office/John Smith”.
- Rating rules are defined using hierarchical structures, for example “acme-vendor-telecom/outgoing/emergency-number”.
The advantage of hierarchical structures are:
- common parameters can be set in the parent node, and they are inherited in the children nodes, that can eventually override them;
- complex structures can be named referring only to the proper parent node;
History preservation
New information does not replace old information, overwriting it, but it is added
to the database, specifying when it became active. So a complete history of the past
is preserved. The advantages are:
- changes of rates and services can be planned in the future;
- CDRs of the past can be re-rated, applying the (correct) old rate specifications;
- customers can change price-categories, or subscription of services, without loosing the history of the past;
- services can change prices, but old prices can (optionally and if configured) still applied to old customers;
Conservative rating
Asterisell uses a conservative approach about CDR rating. In case of doubt it does
not rate a CDR, but it signals the problem.
Official calldate
The official calldate is the date of the last billed CDRs. All CDRs before this date
are not re-rated automatically, because they are considerd as already billed to customers,
and so immodifiable. CDRs after this date are re-rated automatically every time configuration
params change.