Machbarschaft
Project Machbarschaft was created in the context of WirVsVirus Hackathon hosted by the German Government. Our pitch video can be found on youtube. We also have a Devpost Profile and a website machbarschaft.jetzt. Our main repository is here.
This repository contains the details of used services of the Firebase ecosystem and an API to connect our Twilio-Bot with a Firebase/Firestore database utilizing Firebase Functions.
Firebase: Firestore
Our database in Firestore (noSQL) is the central element in our architecture to save processed data from Twilio to make it accessible for the Android and iOS Apps.
Please have a look at the wiki to learn more about our database structure.
Firebase: Firestore API (Cloud function for Twilio-to-Firebase connection)
What is it?
The main code can be found in functions/index.js. It is split up into two Firebase functions, "dataExtender" and "periodicCheck".
The dataExtender function gets called by a Twilio POST-Request with all the data collected during a successful call. The main job of that function is to use Google Maps API to deduce latitude and longitude coordinates from the transcribed address. If that's possible, those coordinates are added to the JSON, otherwise NULL is saved. Finally, the script adds the new JSON, together with a timestamp, to our Firestore database. There it can be read by our App.
The periodicCheck function is scheduled on a regular basis and searches for orders which are open for more than 24 hours, i.e. no volunteer has been found for that order. For every such order, it triggers a recall to the person wo placed the order. This is done by sending a corresponding request to our Twilio instance through the Twilio NodeJS-API.
Why do we need this?
Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to get latitude and longitude coordinates directly from Twilio. Moreover, sending the call data directly to a Firestore database did not really work in the first place. Additionally, we needed to call our periodicCheck function, well.., periodically which seems to be impossible to do with Twilio directly. For that reasons we decided to move that wirk to two Firebase functions.
How do I set it up myself?
To reproduce our setup, you need a Twilio account configured as described in our Twilio repository and a Google Firebase account. We use Google Firebase Cloud Functions to run the two functions dataExtender and periodicCheck.
You mostly just need to upload the two Firebase functions described above to your Firebase account. There you get a link to call the function with (using a POST-request usually). For dataExtender, that link has to be added to your Twilio flow. periodicCheck calls the Twilio API by itself, so no work to do here.