asterisk-vcard-cid

This is a script to extract data from vCard files and insert it into Asterisk in a format that Asterisk can use to re-write Caller-ID information for incoming calls. It should work with vCards from any source, but it’s tested with vCards from ab2vcard, a tool I wrote for extracting vCards from OS X’s Address Book via cron.

Requirements

This tool is written in Ruby. It’s been tested with both Ruby 1.6.8 and Ruby 1.8.1.

Installation

Just copy the ‘vcardcid.rb’ file to somewhere in your path.

Usage

By default, vcardcid will look for .vcf files in the current directory and print caller ID database lines to standard out. The current version of vcardcid only works when there is only one vCard per .vcf file; its behavior with multiple-card files is untested.

vcardcid takes 5 options:

• —asterisk: make vcardcid attempt to add the caller-id line directly to asterisk, instead of printing it to stdout.
• —category=CATEGORY: only product caller-id entries for cards in the specified category. By using this option, you can extract entries for specific OS X Address Book groups.
• —subversion: run ‘svn update’ in the specified directory before importing vCards.
• —dbname=NAME: insert records into the NAME database. By default, the ‘cidname’ database is used. This is the default database for the Asterisk LookupCIDName application.
• —directory=DIR: look for records in DIR rather then the current working directory.
• —value=VAL: instead of using the user’s name as the value of the database entry, use ‘VAL’ instead. Useful for distinctive ring DBs, among other things.

Examples

To extract all vCards from the ‘Home CallerID’ group and automatically insert them into Asterisk, using the Subversion tree in ~/svn/addresses, do this:

# vcardcid --directory=~/svn/addresses --group='Home CallerID' \
    --subversion --asterisk

To extract vCards and insert them into the ‘blacklist’ database for use with the LookupBlacklist application:

# vcardcid --directory=~/svn/addresses --group='Home Blacklist' \
    --subversion --database=blacklist --asterisk

To print all numbers from all cards in the current directory:

# vcardcid

To-Do

Things to do:

• Improve the name mapping, and maybe make it plugable. Right now, people (defined as “they have a first name”) are inserted as ‘LASTNAME, TITLE FIRSTNAME - TYPE’. If only one number exists in the vCard, then ‘- TYPE’ is ignored.
• Improve Asterisk’s LookupCIDName and LookupBlacklist commands to allow the user to specify non-default database lookups.
• Write an example to show how to use this tool to set up caller-ID driven distinctive ring.

Downloads

The author’s Subversion tree for this project is available at http://svn.scottstuff.net/public/asterisk-vcard-cid/trunk. Tarballs for specific releases can be found at http://svn.scottstuff.net/public/asterisk-vcard-cid/download/.

Change History

Here’s what’s happened over time:

• 1.0 (download)—initial release.
• 1.0.1 (download)—fixed extra-space problem for users without titles. Oops.
• 1.0.2 (download)—added ‘—value’ feature.