Bot for easy access to meraki co-term licences information
Our customer had a process to renew the different licences of their own customers, a step of this process consisted in periodically asking our meraki expert when those license wuold expire, this was very inefficient and very time consuming, thus we decided since they already had webex nd were already famliar with bots to create this project.
An Api that will be called by a Webex bot through a Webex webhook, this api will get the data of our customer organizations and their licences from meraki, elaborate it and present it to the user.
The user can write any text to the bot, if it finds any organizations containing that name it will send you a list of those organizations and their licence expiration dates. if the bot does not find any organization whose name contains the sent text, it will instead send the user a card that will contain two buttons, one that shows the organization list with their respective Ids, and one that shows the customer list with their respective license expiration dates.
Main technologies:
- a Webex account with permissions to bots that can read and wite messages.
- a Meraki account that with permissions to read the organization's information
- an ssl certificate this will be used when publishing our Apis.
Clone the repo git clone https://github.com/VEMSistemispa/WebexBotMerakiIntegration.git
using fork click on files and select clone
If you don't have fork installed you may download it here (https://git-fork.com/)
a modal will appear asking for the Repository Url(here we'll paste the cloned url) , the parent folder(the folder where you want the project to be) and the project name
after filling in the required fields press clone.
you can now open code in you IDE of choice, such as visual studio (for this guide i will be using visual studio 2022 as a reference).
if you don't have visual studio you may download it here (https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/it/downloads/)
To start the project you will need to complete the configuration step and then press F5
Inside appsettings.json there are some empty fields that we need to fill in.
{
"Logging": {
"LogLevel": {
"Default": "Information",
"Microsoft.AspNetCore": "Warning"
}
},
"Meraki": {
"ApiKey": "" // insert the api key of the meraki account here
},
"Webex": {
"BotAccessToken": "" // insert the access token of the webex bot here
},
"AllowedHosts": "*"
}
the card that is sent to the user is built dynamically, so it is possible to customize what it shows, the card is created in the CarsService file, inside the method PostCard
- Create a Webex bot, save the access token, this will be used later.(https://developer.webex.com/my-apps/new/bot)
- Get the apikey of the meraki account and save it. (https://account.meraki.com/login/dashboard_login?go=%2F)
- Put the api key inside the appsettings.json file under the section ApiKey inside the section Meraki.
- Put the bot access token inside the BotAccessToken section under the section Webex.
I will illustratte the publishing on iis(Internet information service) process using visual studio right click on the MerakiWebexBotIntegrationProject inside visual studio click on publish select the folder option create your publish profile, the following is the one that was used to publish this project:
Target Location: select a local folder where you want to see the published files
Configuration: Release Target Framework: .Net 6.0 Deployment Mode: Framework Dependant Target Runtime: Portable
after completing your profile click save and then press publish, if every step was executed successfully you should see in your selcted folder trhe published files, create a zip containing said files and move it to the server where the code will be published (Note: the server need to have the required package to run a .Net6.0 application https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/6.0).
exctract the code and put it inside the folder that will be referenced by iis.
open iis
install your ssl certificate (https://support.globalsign.com/ssl/ssl-certificates-installation/how-install-ssl-certificate-iis-10)
create a new application pool for the project, right click on Application Pools and select Add Application Pool the following was the configuration of the application pool created for our publish: Nane: a name of your choice .Net CLR version: No managed code Managed pipeline mode : Integrated and tick the box start application pool immediately
create a new site, right click on Sites and select Add Website
use the following configuration:
Site Name: a name of your choice Application pool: the application pool we just created Physical path: the path of the folder where we extracted our published code
in the binding section Type: select Https Ip Address: All unassigned Port: the port where you want your api to respond Host Name: the url at which the api will respond SSL certificate: the ssl certificate that verifies your api (Note webex will call this api therefore in need to be reachable trough internet and needs to be in https, if the api is published in http or is not reachable trough internet the project will not work)
Now that our Api is published we need to establish the connection between it and the bot, to do this we will create two webex webhooks that will call both of our endpoints
To create a webex Webhook you need to male a Post call to following endpoint https://webexapis.com/v1/webhooks you can use postman to do this or you can use the webex dashboard which is what i'll base this example on:
go to the following url https://developer.webex.com/docs/api/v1/webhooks/create-a-webhook
login with your account
unflag the check Use Personal Access Token and instead use the bot access token
we will first create the webhook that fires when a message is sent to our bot to do this we will make the call with the following parameters
- name : a name of your choice
- targetUrl: the url of your api with a /bot/card added at the end
- resource: messages
- event: created
next we will create a webhook that fires when the user selects one of the options of our card to do this we use the following parameters:
- name : a name of your choice
- targetUrl: the url of your api with a /bot added at the end
- resource: attachmentActions
- event: created
Note: if you want a different endpoint than /bot and /bot/card you can change it by changing the route attributes in the BotController File
if you followed every step correctly you should be able to see your bot in your webex chat and by sending it a message you should receive the expected reply.