Ideas for speed dial by prefix

[lgaetz]

Currently there is no way to speed dial a phone number by feature code. The design philosophy is to make zero changes to the iAddressBook project and only make changes via the possa template, so additional fields or database changes to accommodate speed dial codes are out. The simple way to do this is have users manually enter a speed dial code as part of the phone number, i.e.:
1-888-555-1234 {123}
so speed dialing 123 would call the 888 number. The problem with this is that by manually entering speed dial codes, there is no mechanism to prevent duplicates, there is no way to get a list of speed dial names/codes, what happens if a user uses curly brackets incorrectly etc. etc. just a mess.

A better way to do speed dial codes would be to hijack another less important database field such as 'related names' or 'Instant messaging', edit the possa template to remove the field from display then force the contents to be speed dial codes corresponding to the individual phone numbers. There are still technical issues to solve to prevent duplicates and maybe another template to generate a list of names/codes, neither of which may be possible without changes to core iAB files.