Freeside features

Ivan Kohler ivan at sisd.com
Wed May 12 02:53:03 PDT 1999


On Tue, May 11, 1999 at 08:40:17AM +0300, Badr Al-Badr, Ph.D. wrote:
> A have a couple of questions on the features of freeside:
> 1. can it calculate bills for hourly usage based (as opposed to flat
> rate) pricing plans?

See... mmm...  <http://www.sisd.com/freeside/list-archive/msg00423.html>:

The short version: Yes, you need to import the metering data into SQL.
The long vesion I sent to someone who asked about this privately:

    I'm hoping Freeside can support arbitrailly complex pricing plans
    because of a simple concept: all prices are perl expressions.  So if
    you use `19.95' for example, perl evalates that to be `19.95'.  But if
    you need to do a complex pricing scheme, you just need to write an
    appropriate perl expression, which will most likely pull data from the
    database to return pricing.  Some things will already log to SQL; for
    example most RADIUS servers can or have a patch available.  Getting
    Freeside to bill based on any sort of data then becomes a matter of
    importing the data into the database.

    There are some issues involved with pro-rating, partial month charges,
    that sort of thing.  Expressions will need a standard way to have the
    applicable time/data ranges passed to them.  Also the expressions are
    currently running under the Safe perl module, and the opmask might not
    be right in all situations.  I'll try to spend some time working on
    this if you are using it. 

> 2. can customers view their bills on-line.

Not yet; it needs to be proxied from Freeside to a customer web server in
a secure way using something not completely unlike the fs_passwd,
fs_passwdd, fs_passwd_server trio.

> 
> I could not see these features in the demo.
> 
> thanks
> 
> --
> -------------------------------------------
> Badr H. Al-Badr, Ph.D.
> President
> Al-Alamiah Internet and Communications Company
> 
> PO Box 770 Riyadh 11372
> Saudi Arabia
> Tel +966-1-460-1040
> Fax +966-1-460-1030
> 
> 

-- 
Ivan Kohler <ivan at sisd.com> - finger for PGP key - <moc.dsis at navi> Relhok Navi
Open-source billing and administration for ISPs - http://www.sisd.com/freeside
20 4,16 * * * saytime # please don't be surprised if you find me dreaming too



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