Subject: Announcement Package

From: CHATRAS Bruno FTRD/DAC/ISS <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 10:09:28 +0100

Hi,

I have a question about the use of specific parameters in announcements
(Generic Announcement Package). The "Specific parameters intepretation"
parameter is currently defined a an enumerated type. However the possible
values for this enumaration are specified as "any". Hence, there is no
standard solution for the encoding of the most commonly used types of
variables (date, telephone number, ...). Does it mean that this capability
(variable announcements) will always require additional specifications
before being used between MGs and MGCs from different vendors ?

One possible approach to ease interoperability would have been to define a
coding for the most commonly used types of parameters. For example:
Specific parameters interpretation
        ParameterID:    spi (0x0005)
        Type: enumeration
        Possible values are: "telephone" (0x00), "date" (0x01),"time"
(0x02),"price" (0x03), others
                                "telephone" represents a telephone number as
a string of hexadecimal digits.
                                "date" represents a date as a string of
hexadecimal digits in the format YYMMDD
                                "time" represents a time as a string of
hexadecimal digits in the format HHMMSS

                         "price" represents a price in 1/100 of currency
units.

Is there any reason why this was not specified like that ?

Note: There is no reference to the "price" variable in the list of examples
provided in the "procedures" section. However thist type of variable has
become widely used with prepaid services.

---

From: Christian Groves <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 10:21:53 +1100

G'Day Bruno,

As defacto editor for this (the 2 that started with it have moved on
from their companies) I think the reason for the loose specification was
to allow for a very Generic / Flexible announcement server
functionality. ie, we didn't want to specify in a package that price,
date etc is included when all the announcement server does in your
implementation is to say "busy".

You can always extend the package definition to include values for the
parameters.
ie. IN_Generic_Announcement_Server Package
extends Generic Announcement_Server
Additional values: data, telephone number

Cheers, Christian