Technical information

103
Dial String Conversion
Dial String Conversion
"What you see is what you get" is rarely true for telephone numbers. Almost without thinking we include dashes,
spaces and parentheses in typed and written telephone numbers. When we manually dial a telephone number,
however, we know that we must remove these extra characters.
When entering a fax telephone number into a VSI-FAX client program, users will often use unneeded characters such
as dashes, leave out characters that may be required to access long distance or an outside line, etc. Because of this,
the VSI-FAX software must analyze each fax request to determine the exact telephone number the modem needs to
dial. The process of analyzing and modifying an entered telephone number by VSI-FAX is called dial string
conversion.
Dial string conversion is performed by the FIM. Using information in the vsisrv.ini file and the dialcvt.lst file,
or an optional user-defined conversion program, the dial string conversion process evaluates the dial string. Then
based on whether it is internal, local, long distance, or international, it determines whether extraneous characters
exist, decides whether long-distance carrier access code should be used, and adds or subtracts characters as
needed. This section explains what dial string conversion options are available in VSI-FAX and how to use each
option.
Preliminary dial string conversion
If VSI-FAX is interfaced with another application program that performs the dial string conversion, you can disable the
VSI-FAX dial string conversion function by setting DialConvert to off in the $VSIFAX/lib/vsisrv.ini file.
However, steps 2 through 4 will be performed on all dial strings, even if DialConvert is set to off in the vsisrv.ini file.
If the DialcvtProgram entry in the vsisrv.ini file is set to a program name, the dial string conversion will be performed
by that program. None of the other dial string conversions described here will take place. If the DialcvtProgram entry
is blank, the following dial string conversion will be performed:
1. Any dial string that contains an @ followed by an Internet domain name will be passed to the SendMail FIM
and be sent by email.
2. All dashes, spaces, periods and left and right parentheses are removed from the dial string.
3. Any dial string that begins with # will be stripped of the leading # but will not be processed any further by the
dial string conversion function.
4. Any characters following an @ character will be processed as a post dial string. When a post dial string is
encountered, the modem will wait for five seconds of silence before dialing the characters. Note that this does
not affect an email address, which will have been passed to the SendMail FIM and will therefore not reach this
stage of processing.
5. Any characters following a comma, @, W, or ! will be treated as a separate dial sequence. (As in step 4
above, email addresses are not affected.)
6. Any characters contained within square brackets [ ] will be considered to be a credit card number. No
conversion will be performed on these characters and they will not be used by the dial string conversion
function to categorize the call as internal, international, etc. The brackets, however, will be removed.
7. If the dial string begins with the value of the IntlAccess entry (international access code) in the
vsisrv.ini file, no further dial string conversion will be performed.