Filtering special messages. Zhone or FSO?

[Joel Newkirk]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:41:23 -0800, "Sargun Dhillon"
<xbmodder+openmoko at gmail.com> wrote:
> So we really need a filtering extension for FSO. It would be really
> nice if this sat on the FSO level rather than the dialer level. For
> example, some carriers send out SMS messages with special caller IDs
> in order to notify customers of voicemail. Instead of this hitting the
> user and them seeing a rather odd looking message, we could capture it
> using a "pluggable" app, that would send a newVoicemail signal.
> 
> I can think of other things like phone call filtering depending on who
> is calling you, or where you are. I understand this would be difficult
> to integrate into FSO, as it really isn't the realm of FSO (Blocking
> call handlers, and call state setting). Especially if you get into the
> area of setting notification attributes, like "If this call is from
> _someone unimportant_, and I'm in meeting mode right now, don't ring,
> or buzz, but if it is from a contact in list "special" then feel free
> to buzz.
> 
> This seems like a prime area for the dialer, except if someone writes
> a simple application for Zhone, there is no way it's porting to the
> other hundred distributions (not that many...yet). Would it be better
> to have an entire plugin API to FSO, where dialers can integrate and
> bring up a settings tab, etc.. I agree that there may be far too much
> abstraction here, but I'm brainstorming out loud on the best way to
> write portable applications, with a unified view (UI).
> 
> What do you guys think?

I think this definitely belongs within frameworkd rather than the dialer -
you're talking initially about SMS, which would surely not be the realm of
the dialer, per se.  I've been thinking this same thing, in the context of
sending various 'administrative' SMS messages to the FR to elicit various
responses or actions.  (like 'where are you' or 'lock all my data and set
up a VPN via GPRS to this IP:')  

Best to intercept such messages before they reach the 'conscious' level - a
simple rule for frameworkd could suffice to divert such messages to a
handler that could authenticate and act on on them (and delete them from
SIM), instead of alerting and popping up the message onscreen.

It should already be possible with frameworkd to set up CID-specific
behaviors.  It's not something exposed at the user level but you should at
least be able to change ringtone/profile or reject a call based on
callerID.

j

-- 
Joel Newkirk
http://jthinks.com      (blog)
http://newkirk.us/om (FR stuff)