New Telegram Binding - Tester and Feedback welcome

Add-ons Bindings
, ,
19

We are working on it :slight_smile: I’m trying to support Belgadon with the binding.

What we did so far is to migrate the actions provided by the OH1 telegram action module to the OH2 framework and to make use of the TelegramBots API instead of using a http client directly which provides a better abstraction and saves us some code. Now, it’s not necessary anymore to use both the OH1 action to send messages and the OH2 binding to receive replies from the user.

I would like to present my proposal here to have a base for further discussions. I currently see two use-cases:

1. Use-case: your bot wants to send you a message (and wants an answer from the user)
This is very similar to what Belgadon already presented. I will just shows how it would look in a real working example.

Let’s say we have the following items

String telegramMessage "Telegram Message" { channel = "telegram:telegramBot:620b3747:lastMessageText" }
String telegramReplyId "Telegram Reply Id" { channel = "telegram:telegramBot:620b3747:replyId" }
Switch PresenceAnyone "Anyone [MAP(presence.map):%s]" <presence>

and this is our first rule:

rule "Nobody's at home"
when
   Item PresenceAnyone changed to OFF
then
    val actions = getActions("telegram","telegram:telegramBot:620b3747")
   actions.sendTelegram("MyOH2Bot", "No one is at home, but some lights are still on. Do you want me to turn off the lights?", "Reply_Lights", "Yes", "No")
end

Notice that the third arguments “Reply_Lights” is quite important because it acts as a connection between the sent message and the answer (we will see later)

The other arguments define the button names that will be shown. The alternative of using variable arguments would be to use exactly one argument like “[ Yes ] [ No ]” and to split that internally with String operations.

After this is send, it looks like this:

Screenshot_20190210-185754
Screenshot_20190210-1857541080Ă—1920 313 KB

Then, we have a second rule

rule "Reply handler for lights"
when
    Item telegramReplyId received update Reply_Lights
then
    val actions = getActions("telegram","telegram:telegramBot:620b3747")

    if (telegramMessage.state.toString == "Yes")
    {
        gLights.sendCommand(OFF)
        actions.sendTelegramAnswer("MyOH2Bot", telegramReplyId.state.toString, "Ok, lights are *off* now.") 
    }
    else
    {
        actions.sendTelegramAnswer("MyOH2Bot", telegramReplyId.state.toString, "Ok, I'll leave them *on*.")
    }
end

Here, the “Reply_Lights” is again used in the rule to know for what request the Yes/No answer belongs to.

After the user pressed one of the buttons, the reply markup is removed and the answer is provided:

Screenshot_20190210-185800
Screenshot_20190210-1858001080Ă—1920 323 KB

I pushed the changes for this prototype to Belgadons repository.

2. Use-case: Providing commands

This is not yet implemented, but I think it would be useful if the user could send commands to the bot via /sendcommand Bedroomlight ON
or to get a status: /status TemperatureLivingRoom with reply “The temperature in the “Living Room” is 21°C”
With /help or /list we could show the user a list of available commands and items.

The UI of the telegram client can even show you a list of available commands and you just have to tap on one of them (see Commands).

3 Likes