Cliq Bots - How to make a bot respond to your messages?

Cliq Bots - How to make a bot respond to your messages?

Bots are just like your buddies with whom you can interact. They carry out your tasks, keep you notified about your to-dos and come in handy when you need constant updates from a third party application. 

So, how can you make your bot respond to a message?

The bot message handler is a piece of code triggered when a message is sent to the bot. Message handlers help you customise your bot responses to make it look conversational. The message input from the user can be either a string or an option selected from the bot suggestions. 

Let us try building a utility bot, that will bring us the top news from a particular category chosen from the list of suggestions. 
The sample workflow on triggering this handler is given below. 
  • The user pings the bot to get a list of current top trending news. 
  • Message handler of the bot identifies a keyword from the user's input and is triggered to respond with a list of categories for the user to choose from. 
  • Once the user selects an option, the message input is again captured to call the corresponding API.
  • This API response is shared by the bot to the user in a card format!
A sample code snippet for the above-mentioned scenario is given below. Take a look!

  2. response = Map();
  3. categories = {"Business","Entertainment","Gaming","General","Health-and-Medical","Music","Politics","Science-and-Nature","Sport","Technology"};
  4. if(message.containsIgnoreCase("NEWS") || message.containsIgnoreCase(" BREAKING NEWS") || message.containsIgnoreCase("HEADLINES"))
  5. {
  6. list = List();
  7. for each  category in categories
  8. {
  9. entry = Map();
  10. entry.put("text",category);
  11. list.add(entry);
  12. }
  13. suggestion = Map();
  14. suggestion.put("list", list);
  16. response.put("text","Hey " + user.get("first_name") + " ,choose one option from the list! I can help you with these. :smile:");
  17. response.put("suggestions",suggestion);
  18. }
  19. else if(categories.containsIgnoreCase(message))
  20. {
  21. url = getUrl("https://newsapi.org/v2/top-headlines?category=" + message.toLowerCase() + "&language=en&apiKey=<Insert_API_Key>");
  22. newslist = url.get("articles");
  23. rows = List();
  24. count = 0;
  25. for each  news in newslist
  26. {
  27. count = count + 1;
  28. row = Map();
  29. row.put("Headline",news.get("title"));
  30. row.put("View Link","[Read More](" + news.get("url") + ")");
  31. if(count <= 10)
  32. {
  33. rows.add(row);
  34. }
  35. }
  36. return {"text":"Hello! Here's the top news in the " + message + " category!","card":{"theme":"modern-inline","title":"Hi " + user.get("first_name") + " :smile:"},"slides":{{"type":"table","data":{"headers":{"Headline","View Link"},"rows":rows}}}};
  37. }
  38. else 
  39. {
  40. return {"text": "Hello There, this looks like an invalid category! Just try typing *News* or *Breaking News* or *Headlines*"};
  41. }
  42. return response;



The bot message handler is the easiest way to get started with building an interactive bot. So get started with it right away! 

Few useful links:

Bots Introduction

How to create a bot?

Bot Message Handler

Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Best,
Manasa
Cliq