Posts tagged with 'Couchbase'

I started by creating a few C# classes to represent the structure of the data that Viber will be sending to my serverless endpoint.

Viber classes

This is not an exhaustive representation of Viber’s capabilities by far, but it’s enough to start receiving basic text messages.

public class ViberIncoming
{
    public string Event { get; set; }
    public long Timestamp { get; set; }
    public ViberSender Sender { get; set; }
    public ViberMessage Message { get; set; }
}

public class ViberSender
{
    public string Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

public class ViberMessage
{
    public string Text { get; set; }
    public string Type { get; set; }
}

Next, the Azure function will convert the raw HTTP request into a ViberIncoming object.

[FunctionName("Chatbot")]
public static async Task<HttpResponseMessage> Run(
    [HttpTrigger(AuthorizationLevel.Anonymous, "get", "post", Route = null)]HttpRequestMessage req,
    TraceWriter log)
{
    var incoming = req.Content.ReadAsAsync<ViberIncoming>().Result;

    var viber = new ViberProcessor(Bucket.Value);
    viber.Process(incoming);

    // return "OK" each time
    // this is most important for the initial Viber webhook setup
    return req.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK);
}

After this, I created a ViberProcessor class with a Process method that receives this object.

public void Process(ViberIncoming incoming)
{
    if (incoming?.Message?.Type == "text")
    {
        LogIncoming(incoming);
        ProcessMessage(incoming);
    }
}

Processing Viber messages

LogIncoming creates a record (in Couchbase) so that I know everything about each request that comes in.

ProcessMessage will analyze the text of the message and figure out what to do in response. You can check out the complete code on Github, but here’s a brief snippet to give you the idea:

// if the message contains "hi", "hello", etc say "howdy"
else if (HelloStrings.Any(incoming.Message.Text.ToLower().Contains))
    SendTextMessage("Howdy!", incoming.Sender.Id);
// if message contains "?" then link to the forums
else if (incoming.Message.Text.Contains("?"))
    SendTextMessage("If you have a Couchbase question, please ask on the forums! http://forums.couchbase.com", incoming.Sender.Id);
else
    SendTextMessage("I'm sorry, I don't understand you. Type 'help' for help!", incoming.Sender.Id);

Getting metrics

One of things my chatbot listens for is "metrics". When you ask it for metrics, it will give you a count of the incoming messages that it’s processed. Since I’m logging every request to Couchbase, querying for metrics is easily done with a N1QL query.

private string GetMetrics()
{
    var n1ql = @"select value count(*) as totalIncoming
                from ViberChatBot b
                where meta(b).id like 'incoming::%';";
    var query = QueryRequest.Create(n1ql);
    var response = _bucket.Query<int>(query);
    if (response.Success)
        return $"I have received {response.Rows.First()} incoming messages so far!";
    return "Sorry, I'm having trouble getting metrics right now.";
}

Sending a message back

The chatbot needs to communicate back to the person who’s talking to it. As I said earlier, there is no Viber .NET SDK, so I have to create a REST call "manually". This is easy enough with RestSharp:

private void SendTextMessage(string message, string senderId)
{
    var client = new RestClient("https://chatapi.viber.com/pa/send_message");
    var request = new RestRequest(RestSharp.Method.POST);
    request.AddJsonBody(new
    {
        receiver = senderId,    // receiver	(Unique Viber user id, required)
        type = "text",          // type	(Message type, required) Available message types: text, picture, etc
        text = message
    });
    request.AddHeader("X-Viber-Auth-Token", ViberKey);
    var response = client.Execute(request);

    // log to Couchbase
    _bucket.Insert("resp::" + Guid.NewGuid(), response.Content);
}

Note that I’m also logging each response from Viber to Couchbase. This could be very useful information for later analysis and/or troubleshooting. If Viber decides to change the structure and content of their response, the data in Couchbase is all stored as flexible JSON data. You will not get surprise errors or missing data at this ingestion point.