I'm developing Facebook messenger bot. Based on the official sample
here made by Node.js, Express, ES7.
I want to use Firebase database, trigger event.
If someone updates the database, send notice to certain people. I add source code "Child Changed" to "messages.js" in messenger-api-helpers, but it doesn't work.
I can check working "Child Changed" in HTML, but in messenger, I cannot.
Where should I write the trigger events code?
You should definitely use Facebook Messenger Broadcast API for this kind of functionality. This will broadcast a notice/broadcast to users.
Caveats:
You have to apply for this permission. (pages_messaging and pages_messaging_subscriptions.Takes about 1-2 days, but
can test on Admin/Test users of the app)
Each broadcast has to be a separate broadcast. (e.g. you can't send image and a text together, each has to be its own individual broadcast).
Have some kind of un-subscription option as well. FB user might think you are spamming even if you clearly say in the messages that your bot will send updates.
Use custom labels to create targetted sends. So you can either subdivide who you will send updates to about specific issues or just label people if they unsubscribe to your broadcast or not.
Basic workflow:
Get permission to broadcast.
On event in your Database. Start process.
Create message_creative_id via POST to endpoint
Use message_creative_id to POST a broadcast_messages
On a successful send you will get back broadcast_id
Related
I have a service that listens for certain updates and then uses a Discord Bot to post a message on a channel. A random example: every time a team scores a goal, post a message in a channel. I got an email from Discord to reset my bot token because there were too many logins.
As you know, in order to use the Bot you use the client.login("XXX") method. So every time there is an update my service initializes the bot and then sends a message. My assumption is that it has to do with me calling client.login("XXX") for every update. Since my service runs serverless, I can not keep the service up.
Is there a way to make the bot post a message without having to use client.login("XXX")? Or can anyone suggest any strategy to make this logic work?
That is not possible as a bot cannot do any actions without being logged in, it sounds like channel webhooks would fit your needs better.
You simply generate a webhook link in a channel which you can then post messages to through a post request.
You can read more about webhooks here
And you can read more about the required paramters and how to format a POST request to the webhook here
Update: June 30, 2020
After more testing, I have details that might help someone recognize my problem.
The issue seems to be that Slack is sending data to Azure Bot Services, but that data isn't being forwarded to my code. Ive been able to use the Bot Emulator without any problems and the Azure Web Chat works fine.
I know that the Slack configuration for the OAuth Redirect URL is correct (I was able to add my bot to Slack) and the Request URL for Events is correct (they sent the 'challenge' and it's verified). I've subscribed to the exact Scopes and Events that are in the Microsoft documentation and I've verified that the Interactivity and Events options are enabled.
When a user types text in my bot's Slack channel, my app receives "message" activity and my code can send a response, so it looks like Microsoft can communicate end-to-end for normal messages. I do not receive any data when users first join my bot (like a ConversationUpdate) or if they click a button in a dialog. I can see Slack sending data when a button is pressed, it just never arrives.
As a test, I copied the Messaging Endpoint from my Azure bot settings and pasted it into Slack's Interactivity "Request URL" and when I click a button in Slack I can see the data that Slack is sending (sadly in a format that my code can't handle).
Original Post
I have a Bot Framework app (v4) that I've written in nodejs. It works well and I have an ActivityHandler that responds to people being added to a conversation and when they send messages. I was able to get pro-active messaging functioning and everything was great until I tried to get interactivity working.
I started off using some sample button code from Microsoft's documentation:
let reply = MessageFactory.suggestedActions(['Red', 'Yellow', 'Blue'], 'What is the best color?');
await turnContext.sendActivity(reply);
This works fine in the emulator, but in Slack it renders as a bulleted list. It looks like that's the way that "suggested actions" are handled in Slack.
I changed my code to use a "hero card":
let card = CardFactory.heroCard(
'What is the best color?',
undefined,
CardFactory.actions([
{
type: 'imBack',
title: 'Color Red',
value: 'Red Value'
}
])
);
let reply = MessageFactory.attachment(card);
await turnContext.sendActivity(reply);
This works okay in the emulator, except my app thinks the user typed "Red Value" and the button stays on-screen and is still clickable. I might be able to work around that, but the button doesn't work at all in Slack. It is rendered fine, but I don't get a notification in my app.
Clicking the button shows an HTTP request to:
https://{MY_SLACK}.slack.com/api/chat.attachmentAction?_x_id=f8d003c3-1592436018.632&_x_csid=NcWi3y50lFU&slack_route={OTHER_SLACK_STUFF}
And I can see that the request POSTs all sorts of data including:
payload: {"actions":[{"id":"1","name":"imBack","text":"Color Red","type":"button","value":"Red Value","style":"default"}],"attachment_id":"2","callback_id":"{MAGIC_NUMBER}:{TEAM_ID}","channel_id":"{CHANNEL_ID}","message_ts":"1592435983.056000","prompt_app_install":false,"team_id":"{TEAM_ID}"}
I'm not sure how to see anything useful in the Azure Portal - the analytics option for my bot doesn't seem to work and the activities option only says "Write a Bot Service". I don't see any sign of the message going from Slack to Azure.
I'm developing locally and configured ngrok so that my messaging endpoint in Azure could be set to https://69fe1382ce17.ngrok.io/api/messages On the Slack side of things, I've configured the Interactivity Request URL to be https://slack.botframework.com/api/Actions The Event Subscription Request URL is https://slack.botframework.com/api/Events/{MY_BOT_NAME}
What I would like is a set of buttons with different options and when the user clicks one, my bot gets some sort of "value" instead of message text. I'd also like for the button to go away so the user can't send repeated commands. It would be nice if the hero card collapsed with just the prompt being displayed.
Are there any interactive options that work for Slack and other channels?
Thanks!
Lee
I know linking to another site with no additional detail is frowned upon, but I don't have enough expertise to answer your question. I suspect the link here might move you in the right direction:
Choice Prompts are not translated over to Slack format #3974
Good luck!
Your question is multifaceted so I'll try to break it down into smaller pieces.
What's the deal with suggested actions in Slack?
Suggested actions are not supported in Slack, but the Bot Builder SDK thinks they are. This is a longstanding bug. I've just reported it again on the docs page you linked: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/bot-docs/issues/1742
This means you would encounter problems if you were trying to have the choice factory automatically generate the right kind of choices for your channel. You're not doing that, so you should be fine. Hero cards are supposed to work in Slack.
Why aren't hero cards working in Slack?
First I need to mention that hero cards only work with the Slack connector and not the Slack adapter. You seem to be using the connector so you should be fine.
I suspect your problem is related to how you've configured your bot's settings on the Slack side. There is a step in the Bot Framework doc that seems to be important if you want to get buttons to work. If you've followed the doc exactly and you still can't get buttons to work, it may be worthwhile to dig into the Slack API documentation.
How do I only allow a button to be clicked once?
You can update or delete the activity. There's no easy way to do this, but if you voice your support for my cards library then it can be done for you automatically.
The Slack connector actually puts a lot of relevant information in the incoming activity's channel data, and you can use that to figure out what activity the incoming activity came from. That would take some experimentation on your part.
There's another approach that works on more channels than just Slack. It's real complicated, but if you wanna tackle this then here are the basic steps:
You need to put an ID in the action data to help your bot identify the action.
You need to save the activity ID that gets returned when you send the action to Slack.
You need to associate the returned activity ID with the ID you put in the action data.
You need to retrieve the activity ID using the action data ID when the user clicks the button.
You need to use that activity ID to update or delete the activity.
Unfortunately there's no centralized guide to help you do this, but there are many examples explaining it scattered across Stack Overflow. Here is a good one: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55174866/2122672
I'm making a dialogflow agent that will be integrated with various platforms (Facebook messenger, slack and maybe a few others) that will have the basic functions of a informational chatbot.
The agent will be for a specific store and I'm wondering if it's possible to trigger some sort of welcome message once the user enters the geofence (in this case, the store)?
Thanks for the help. I haven't found any documentation for this on dialogflow specifically or anywhere else so anything will be awesome.
Note: I'm am not by any means dead set of dialogflow, if AWS Lex offers something like this and it's better, I will take a look. I'm just a bit more used to dialogflow.
This cannot be achieved just by using either Lex or Dialogflow. Because at the end of the day, you are using them to integrate with Messenger/Slack/Whatsapp and these apps will (for obvious good reasons) not share the user's location information with the bot. You will need a helper app which takes the user's location permission as well and triggers the bots for you.
Keep in mind that channels like Messenger and Whatsapp have restrictions over sending messages willy-nilly to users. Messenger has a '24+1' policy Whatsapp also you can only send free form messages in the 24 hour window. But after that you can send chargeable pre-approved "hsm" message templates.
I am just now creating my first bot for my own use, and I want
to gather user information and search through my database for it.
I figured the best way for this is just to ask the question before the user
starts the conversation. Does anyone know how I can accomplish this (getting the bot to send a message first)?
Trigger an event as soon as user comes to the chat bot platform - see https://api.ai/docs/events. Nearly all platforms triggers an event for users first time. Check the facebook bot docs.
There is provision to do so in api.ai. The event is a feature that allows you to invoke intents by an event name instead of a user query. You just need to define event names for intents. Then, you can trigger these intents by sending a /query request containing an event parameter.
I have a Facebook Messenger bot (written in NodeJS) and a separate control panel where a user can manage the information that the bot is working with (like inventory stock, etc.). One of those things is a log of all conversations between the bot and a visitor. The control panel allows the admin users to send messages to visitors through the bot. There is an input box where they can type in a message and when they click 'Send', the message goes to the bot app, which then sends it back to the user through Send API.
Messages are logged into a database; those going to the bot (from the visitor) are logged when they're received, and those the bot responds with are logged through the 'echo' callback.
The problem with this is that the bot can reply to certain visitor commands (phrases) and tries to perform certain actions based on the input. I'm using Wit.ai for this, but due to the scope of the possible phrases and keywords, the default mode when someone sends a text message is to send it to Wit.ai for processing. However, if an admin user sends the visitor a message from the control panel, the visitor could want to respond to that message (instead of sending a bot command) and that response should not go to the Wit.ai for processing. And due to the sheer scope of possible variations of what can be said, coupled with the fact that they can actually use some of the keywords in the response as well, processing the intent with Wit.ai in that case is too uncertain.
I was wondering if there's a way to somehow identify/mark the source of the messages that the bot sends to the visitor, so when an echo callback comes, I can know if it's, say, from a regular bot routine or from a user-entered reply. Like some additional meta tags that could be sent with the message that would also get returned with the echo, but that doesn't pollute the message itself. Is something like that possible? Or is there a different way I can achieve the same result.
I don't wether that helps you, but Facebook just recently integrated a quite mysterious Tag feature for bots.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/send-api-reference/tags