Jerome,
Jerome Martin wrote:
You are getting confused between the actual
dialogs stored persistently
in databe and the dialog _profiles_ information.
The dialogs are persistent in db_mode > 0, and upon restart of the
proxy, based on proxy IPs, the dialogs will be restored in memory from
database. This allows to perform dialog-matching for subsequent
requests.
For instance, if you start a dialog, then restart the proxy (reloading
the dialog info from database), you will notice that a BYE for this
dialog that arrives after the restart will trigger the correct
computation of $DLG_duration (this is just an example).
Dialog profiles, on the other hand, is transient, in-memroy information
that is not currently stored in database. I think the main reason is
that dialog profiles were initially intended to be used for statistics,
not dialog matching/accounting/authorisation.
However your use case, IMHO, is valid and deserves to be taken into
consideration for future dialog module improvements.
I hope this clarifies the point of storing dialogs in database ...
That does, indeed, clarify. Thank you. I assumed that a "profile" is
just an abstraction around certain properties of the dialog built into
its hash information, but was suspecting that there may be more
meta-data involved.
But as you rightly observe, that does complicate my use case. In this
case, if I fail over while a call is in progress and then the BYE for
it arrives, while it may calculate $DLG_duration usefully for example,
the proxy will not recognise it as belonging to an existing dialog and
refuse to forward it or any other in-dialog messages.
So, it seems that while "this allows to perform dialog-matching for
subsequent requests," this is true in one type of use case but -
critically and very importantly - not in another. Since
is_in_profile() is the only way to check if a request belongs to a
known dialog, authorisation is thus tied to profiles rather than mere
awareness of certain dialogs. This is unfortunate. All I want to do
is check if subsequent in-dialog requests belong to a known dialog; I
care not whether this is done by dipping into "profiles" or simply
asking the dialog module, "Do you know about this dialog?"
I think this should not be that hard to implement - maybe a new function
in the dialog module, eg: is_in_dialog()?