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[ahmedmunir007 at gmail...]

I want to ask three questions related to mod_nibble bills, as I'm listing down below;

1- Can we select/use dynamic tables for billing using nibble bill?
2- Can we define more than two tables and attributes in nibblebill.conf.xml?
3- As Nibble bill is use to deduct amount of user account, Can we deduct minutes instead of cash? Because my case is, if a user buy a package and I only want to deducts his/her minutes. How we can resolve it by nibble bill? / What other way we can resolve it?

Kindly advise soon.
--
Regards,

Ahmed Munir

[jmesquita at freeswitc...]

I am testing the latest version of nibblebill so let me see if I can help you with your questions.

jm

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 12:39 AM, Ahmed Munir <ahmedmunir007@gmail.com (ahmedmunir007@gmail.com)> wrote:

[dome at tel.co.th]

2009/10/9 Ahmed Munir <ahmedmunir007@gmail.com>:

[shaheryarkh at googlem...]

I haven't don't any nibble bill project so i am not aware of its configuration details but here are some of the feature of mod_nibble (reference to wiki url http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Mod_nibblebill),

• Debit credit/cash from accounts real-time
• Allow for billing at different rates during a single call
• Allow for warning callers when their balance is low (via audio, in-channel)
• Allow for disconnecting or re-routing calls when balance is depleted
• Allow billing functions listed above to operate with multiple concurrent calls

This means you can have packages where you offer users say X amount of free minutes and when they are all used up, you can start charging cost Y WITHOUT dropping user's call. All you need to do is (reference to JM's reply below),

1. Set X in cash column, and deduct 1 per 60 seconds. If you are billing on different time scale then per minute charges then cash value would be,

Cash = X * 1/T

Where,
X = number of free minutes in package
T = billing interval in minutes

So, if you have 30 free minutes and 30 second billing interval then cash would be 30 x 1/0.5 = 60.

2. After X minutes have passed during a call (i.e. when cash value becomes zero), you can change billing rate to whatever you want to charge user on per minute basis (or whatever your billing interval may be) without dropping the call (but it would be good to warn user about it before you start charging him money).

Lastly using different tables schema for mod_nibble may not be a good idea. I recommend using a standard billing table like mod_nibble already has. You can of course extend this schema to store addition information of your choice OR you can use SQL Views to combine different tables and behave as a single table for any pre-existing reports etc. But do remember that SQL Views are normally Read Only in nearly all modren DBMS.

Thank you.


2009/10/10 João Mesquita <jmesquita@freeswitch.org (jmesquita@freeswitch.org)>