The Deliverator Slack Bot: Building on top of Urban Airship Connect

Hankering for a Connect Bot

I used to be a pretty decent engineer, but I don’t write code anymore and haven’t in years. My skills were never as good as the vast majority of Urban Airship’s engineers (they amaze me every day!), but I was pretty alright for the time.

A couple weekends ago, I got a hankering to write some code as I’ve been curious what creating a Slack bot for Urban Airship Connect might look like. Connect delivers real time individual user-level data to a destination of your choice. Slack is a popular group messaging platform for teams that we use at Urban Airship. Combining Slack with Connect and our Engage API could help surface real-time insights and execute actions in Urban Airship Engage without ever leaving Slack.

Good news for me: Slack is encouraging the development of bots & apps on top of the Slack platform. We have numerous bots that we use at Urban Airship to help us run the company (e.g., get notified of alerts, new customers, support cases, execute deploys, praise Airshipper good work and add to their karma score). I named my new  bot “Deliverator” based on some discussion with friends.

I went into this assuming I’d spend a bunch of time getting set up and then run out of time or get frustrated, but I was delighted that it was incredibly easy to get started.

This post summarizes the technical setup, code examples, a demonstration, feature ideas and next steps for the Deliverator bot. I’ll be really interested in your feedback, which we’ll gather in the form of a quick survey (embedded below). We’ll select one random winner from all survey respondents to receive an Urban Airship longboard!

Technical Setup

Java

I wrote a lot of Java years ago so I figured I’d start there. I also used to use IntelliJ and it is even better than it was years ago so I set it up really quickly. Urban Airship Connect and Slack both have great libraries available. I used the Urban Airship Connect Java library to use Connect over the Connect HTTPS Streaming API, the Urban Airship Engage Java Library to use the HTTPS Push API and the Simple Slack API library.

IntelliJ Setup

Configuration

Configuring a Bot account in Slack and setting up an Urban Airship Connect token was easy.

Code Examples

Some of this code may look circa Java 1.4 style (where I left off). I’m sharing it anyway to show how easy it is to work with Connect & Slack, even for me! It’s definitely not intended to win any style points or go anywhere near production.

Bot Starting Connect & Handling Connect Events

 

 public void startUp() throws Exception {
   log.info("starting up Deliverator connection to Connect");


   ImmutableMap im = ImmutableMap.of("connect.client.mes.stream.maxAppStreamConsumeMillis", TimeUnit.SECONDS.toMillis(600L));
   Configuration config = new MapConfiguration(im);

   AsyncHttpClient httpClient = StreamUtils.buildHttpClient(new ConnectClientConfiguration(config));

   final String appKey = "your-app-key-here";
   final String token = "your-token-here";
   Creds creds = Creds.newBuilder().setAppKey(appKey).setToken(token).build();

   StreamQueryDescriptor descriptor = StreamQueryDescriptor.newBuilder()
           .setCreds(creds)
           .build();

   FatalExceptionHandler fatalExceptionHandler = new FatalExceptionHandler() {
       public void handle(Exception e) { log.fatal(e); }
   };

   Consumer consumer = new Consumer() {

       // Process Events
       public void accept(Event event) {
           log.info("Received event:" + event.getIdentifier());

           collectCounts(event);
           watchList(event);
           countPushesSent(event);
       }
   };

   final MobileEventConsumerService service = MobileEventConsumerService.newBuilder()
           .setBaseStreamQueryDescriptor(descriptor)
           .setConfig(config)
           .setClient(httpClient)
           .setOffsetManager(new InFileOffsetManager(creds.getAppKey()))
           .setFatalExceptionHandler(fatalExceptionHandler)
           .setConsumer(consumer)
           .build();

   ScheduledExecutorService scheduledExecutorService = Executors.newScheduledThreadPool(1);
   Runnable stopConsuming = new Runnable() {
       public void run() {
           service.triggerShutdown();
           log.info("shutdown");
       }
   };

   scheduledExecutorService.schedule(stopConsuming, 60*60, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
   service.run();

   log.info("Connect now running ...");
}
 

Bot Starting Slack & Handling Slack Bot Commands

 public void startUp() throws Exception {

   log.info("starting up Deliverator connection to Slack");
   slackSession = SlackSessionFactory.
           createWebSocketSlackSession("your-slack-api-token");
   slackSession.connect();
   SlackMessageHandle joinStat = slackSession.joinChannel(channelName);
   deliveratorChan = slackSession.findChannelByName(channelName);

   SlackMessageHandle slackMessageHandle = slackSession.sendMessage(deliveratorChan, "¡¡¡ Deliverator Reporting for duty !!!");
   slackMessageHandle.getMessageId();

   log.info("Slack is all set up ...");

   slackSession.addMessagePostedListener(new SlackMessagePostedListener()
   {
       public void onEvent(SlackMessagePosted event, SlackSession session)
       {

           String slackMessage = event.getMessageContent();

           if (botCommandManager.isCommand(slackMessage))
           {
               log.info("Deliverator command received:" + slackMessage);

               CommandResult result = botCommandManager.execute(slackMessage);

               log.info("CommandResult:" + result);

               if (result != null) {
                   session.sendMessage(deliveratorChan, result.getBotReturnText());
               } else {
                   session.sendMessage(deliveratorChan, "Unsupported Deliverator Command");
               }


           } else {
               log.info("NA / not a deliverator command");
           }

       }
   });

}
 

Stats Command

The StatsCommand pulls off various counts from the ConnectManager. The ConnectManager increments counts for each event it processes.

 public class StatsCommand implements Command {

   public CommandResult execute() {
       CommandResult result = new CommandResult();
       result.setBotReturnText(getStatsString());

       return result;
   }


   private String getStatsString() {
       ConnectManager connectManager = ConnectManager.getInstance();

       return "Deliverator Stats{" +
               "total='" + connectManager.getEventCountTotal() + '\'' +
               ", android=" + connectManager.getEventCountTotal() +
               ", ios=" + connectManager.getIosTotal() +
               ", namedUser=" + connectManager.getNamedUserTotal() +
               ", openCount=" + connectManager.getOpenCount() +
               ", closeCount=" + connectManager.getCloseCount() +
               ", customCount=" + connectManager.getCustomCount() +
               ", locationCount=" + connectManager.getLocationCount() +
               ", sendCount=" + connectManager.getSendCount() +
               ", tagChangeCount=" + connectManager.getTagChangeCount() +
               ", firstOpenCount=" + connectManager.getFirstOpenCount() +
               ", pushBodyCount=" + connectManager.getPushBodyCount() +
               ", uninstallCount=" + connectManager.getUninstallCount() +
               ", richDeliveryCount=" + connectManager.getRichDeliveryCount() +
               ", richReadCount=" + connectManager.getRichReadCount() +
               ", richDeleteCount=" + connectManager.getRichDeleteCount() +
               ", iamExpiryCount=" + connectManager.getIamExpiryCount() +
               ", iamResolutionCount=" + connectManager.getIamResolutionCount() +
               ", iamDisplayCount=" + connectManager.getIamDisplayCount() +
               '}';

   }
}
 

Send Push Notification

For testing, I just sent a blank push notification to all iOS users from Urban Airship’s beloved internal test app, Goat. After the notification is sent, the push ID is set on ConnectManager so that the user-level send events can be tracked and I could see progress as the push is sent.

 public APIPushResponse sendPush() {

   APIPushResponse pushResponse = null;

   log.info("Fixing to send a push");

   APIClient apiClient = APIClient.newBuilder()
           .setKey(appKey)
           .setSecret(appSecret)
           .build();

   PushPayload payload = PushPayload.newBuilder()
           .setAudience(Selectors.all())
           // send a blank push 
           .setNotification(Notifications.alert(""))
           .setDeviceTypes(DeviceTypeData.of(DeviceType.IOS))
           .build();

   try {
       APIClientResponse response = apiClient.push(payload);

       pushResponse = response.getApiResponse();

       String pushId = response.getApiResponse().getPushIds().get().get(0);
       log.info("Sent push:" + pushId);

       ConnectManager.getInstance().setWatchPushId(pushId);

       log.info(String.format("Response %s", response.toString()));
       log.info("response object"+ response);

   } catch (APIRequestException ex) {
       log.error(String.format("APIRequestException " + ex));
       log.error("Something wrong with the request " + ex.toString());
   } catch (IOException e) {
       log.error("IOException in API request " + e.getMessage());
   }
   return pushResponse;

}

Demo

Here’s what Deliverator  looks like in action inside Slack.

Stats Command

First, let’s start up the bot and see what the current stats are. For now, stats are just counts of a couple things.

 

 

Resources:
http://docs.urbanairship.com/dev-resources.html

http://docs.urbanairship.com/connect/index.html