The main purpose of this project is to provide a bot that a user can use to find flights and potentially make travel plans. Users should be able to provide the necessary information in normal English, and the bot should make inferences of its own to find flight info. This entails that the bot should somehow be able to understand text, and that the bot should have access to flight data. For the latter, the we will access Google's QPX Express API, which is a RESTful API that provides real time flight data. It's possible that for the understanding of text, NLP algorithms may be utilized.
This "Serverless" Slack bot is built with nodejs and StdLib. Some of the functions
and utilities were provided via StdLib (through a npm install lib.cli -g on cmd line,
followed by $ mkdir stdlib, $ cd stdlib, and $ lib init.
As of right now, the bot currently has a Slash command '/flight' which can understand "/flight from BOS to LAX on 2017-09-12 for 1 adult", constructs a JSON that looks like the request JSON that will be understood by the QPX API (something like the following), and sends it to the API:
{
"request":
{
"slice":
[
{
"origin":"BOS",
"destination":"LAX",
"date":"2017-09-12"
}
],
"passengers":
{
"adultCount":1,
"childCount":0,
"infantLapCount":0,
"infantSeatCount":0,
"seniorCount":0
},
"solutions":20,
"refundable":false
}
}
This was achieved by simple string searching in JS and is very much hard coded to look for keywords like "from", "to", "on", "for", to understand origin, destination, date, and passenger info, respectively. (The actual POST request to the API returns 'undefined' for some reason, I am unsure of why.)
There are several functions in this Slack Bot. See the /functions/ directory
your StdLib function directory which maps directly to HTTP endpoints.
-
__main__.js-- main endpoint
-- can be reached viahttps://ishnark.lib.id/slack-app@dev/main
-- provides "Add to Slack" button, so app can be distributed -
auth.js-- OAuth endpoint
-- This endpoint processes an OAuth request and returns the contents ofslack/pages/auth.ejs -
commands/__main__.js-- Command Handler function for Slack Slash Commands
-- triggered by slack at:https://ishnark.lib.id/slack-app@dev>/commands/:bg -
events/__main__.js-- Event Handler function for Slack Event API
-- triggered by slack at:https://ishnark.lib.id/slack-app@dev>/events/:bg -
actions/__main__.js-- Action Handler function for handling Slack Actions from messages
-- triggered by slack at:https://ishnark.lib.id/slack-app@dev>/actions/:bg.
This Slack App template comes with some utility function in slack/utils.
- message.js - send messages to users or channels
- update_message.js - update messages in channels
- respond.js - like message, but does HTTP POST message to webhook endpoint
- upload.js - upload files to a channel