Language Club Bot

A semester project for Data Engineering course in Theoretical Computer Science department of Jagiellonian University.

The database is used to store the data about current club members, their levels of knowledge of various languages and club meetings. It gives an opportunity to speed up the process of organizing, maintaining and controlling a club meeting, which involves registration, creation of conversations graph and administration.

Meeting procedure

1. Registration
2. Confirmation of participation exactly at the meeting
3. Face-to-face conversations with all other participants

Bot functionality

1. User sign up (choosing languages and their levels of knowledge)
2. List of all future meetings
3. Registration for the future meeting
4. Sending information about the interlocutors while meeting
5. List of all previous interlocutor
6. Sending messages from users to admin extra functionality for admins
7. Approving a club member participation in the meeting
8. Adding a new meeting
9. Adding a new admin

Technical details

Сhanges in the database compared to the first stage

1. Adding column status to table users for handling bot events.
2. Deleting column levelName from table languages due to useless in bot.
3. Deleting conversationID from table conversations, adding column rowNumber and changing primary key for more functionality.
4. Adding new functions to simplify work with the database.
5. Adding enums instead of some functions.

Bot working mode

We host our bot on heroku.com as web dyno, so:

• if Bot receives no web traffic in a 30-minute period, it will go into sleep mode
• if Bot is in sleep mode, it becomes active from any request (nearly 10-20 seconds)

How To Use

How to test existing bot

1. Accept our invitation to test the bot (works only from browser version of Facebook).
2. Write to Language Club page from Facebook Messanger on your phone.

How to independently build a project from sources

Requirements

1. Facebook Developer Account
2. Account on heroku.com
3. Account on github.com

Steps

1. Create new PostrgeSQL database and fill it by create.sql from src.tar
2. Copy files from src.tar to a new gihhub repo
3. Create new app on heroku.com and connect it to your gihhub repo
4. Create Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/pages/create)
5. Create Facebook App

• login to https://developers.facebook.com/
• click "Get Started" (this will make your facebook account a developer account)
• click "Add a New App" to add the chatbot as an app
• add a name for the App and provide a contact email
• click "Create App ID", and proceed with the "entering these characters in the box" security check
• after the app ID is created, you will see the Chatbot dashboard
• click Settings → Basic and choose "Business and Pages" under Category (according to the categories information help link, page app is under this category)
• click “Save Changes” in the bottom right hand corner

6. Add Messenger to Facebook App

• click "+ Add Product" in the right-hand side menu of the dashboard
• choose "Messenger" and click "Set Up"
• after it has been set up, you can see “Messenger” added under the “PRODUCTS” menu on the right-hand side. We will revisit this Messenger configuration later to hook up the app with our facebook page and hook up the app with backend code.

7. Setup webhook (Extra information on https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/getting-started/webhook-setup)

• choose webhooks on Messanger configurations
• click "choose events" and mark: messages, messaging_postbacks, messaging_optins, message_deliveries, message_reads, messaging_payments, messaging_pre_checkouts, messaging_checkout_updates, messaging_account_linking, messaging_referrals, message_echoes, standby, messaging_policy_enforcement
• choose your Facebook Page below
• use https://YOUR-HEROKU-APP-NAME.herokuapp.com/webhook as request url, and write any string in VERIFICATION_TOKEN field (but remember it)

8. Heroku deploy

• open https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps/YOUR-HEROKU-APP-NAME/settings -> Config vars and define: DB_HOST, DB_NAME, DB_PASSWORD, DB_PORT, DB_USER, SERVER_URL (https://YOUR-HEROKU-APP-NAME.herokuapp.com), VERIFICATION_TOKEN (from Facebook setup step), PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN (go back to the Facebook App Dashboard, select Settings under PRODUCTS → Messenger, and select Environment in the Token Generation section under Page)
• enable Automatic deploys on https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps/YOUR-HEROKU-APP-NAME/deploy/github

Authors

• Demian Banakh (First stage: database triggers and functions, Second stage: js react webviews, js-postgreSQL connection)
• Artur Kasymov (First stage: database tables and references, Second stage: small rewrites of database scheme, code using Facebook Messenger API)