onTurn error for Teams bot on certain Teams system messages - botframework

I have a bot (based on the old core-bot-sample) that is deployed to Microsoft Teams. Sometimes, when there is a notification event in Teams such as New Channel Added or Channel Deleted (or possible User Added/Removed), I am getting the following onTurn Error: "error":"Cannot read property 'length' of undefined". By looking at the code, it seems the Welcome Message code is to blame. The only length property is on context.activity.membersAdded, so that must be causing the issue. But I don't understand exactly what is happening. Based on the statement below, the event must be triggering a ConversationUpdate activity, but without the membersAdded property. Can anyone shed some light on what this activity is that Teams is triggering, and what I should add to this welcome message statement to prevent the error message from occuring? To clarify, the error message is coming in the Posts channel of the Team/Channel where the event such as channel removal message is coming.
Code section where I think the error is occurring:
} else if (context.activity.type === ActivityTypes.ConversationUpdate) {
// Handle ConversationUpdate activity type, which is used to indicates new members add to
// the conversation.
// see https://aka.ms/about-bot-activity-message to learn more about the message and other activity types
// Do we have any new members added to the conversation?
if (context.activity.membersAdded.length !== 0) {
// Iterate over all new members added to the conversation
for (var idx in context.activity.membersAdded) {
// Greet anyone that was not the target (recipient) of this message
// the 'bot' is the recipient for events from the channel,
// context.activity.membersAdded == context.activity.recipient.Id indicates the
// bot was added to the conversation.
if (context.activity.membersAdded[idx].id === context.activity.recipient.id) {
// Welcome user.
await context.sendActivity('Hi! I\'m the IT Innovation Bot. I can answer questions about the innovation team and capture your innovation ideas. Let me know how I can help!')
}
}
}
}

It looks like that would fail for any activity where the type was ConversationUpdate, but the JSON payload doesn't contain the membersAdded object. The list of those events can be found here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/bots/how-to/conversations/subscribe-to-conversation-events?tabs=json
You could test this by firing one of the non-membersAdded events (for example, add a new channel to the team, or remove a member). You could probably fix this by doing a null check on the membersAdded object.

Related

Perform action on seen/unseen messages with socket.io

What is the best practice to handle seen/unseen messages in a chat room application based on Nodejs/SocketIO/React.
Consider User1 sends a message to a room. If another user has seen that message, notify all users that the state of message has been seen.
In my opinion using message brokers can be the better solution instead socket. I actually think that socket should only handle chat messages that are synchronously. but for seen/unseen status I prefer message brokers that are asynchronous. Are there any solutions or best practice in large scale applications?
It's unclear what you have currently tried, meaning that I can only advise solutions in order to achieve your aim.
To firstly identify that a message was seen, IntersectionObserver is an inbuilt API that detects when an element has entered the viewport, meaning that it is visible, therefore; obviously seen. I have added comments in the code below where you should add a function to call to the server that the message was seen, however, that's up to you to implement.
const observer = new window.IntersectionObserver(([entry]) => {
if (entry.isIntersecting) {
// Send a message to the server that the user has viewed the message.
// Eg. socket.emit('read-message', message.id)
return
}
}, {
root: null,
threshold: 0.1,
})
observer.observe(document.getElementById(message.id));
Additionally, there's no need to use message broker, as socket.io can handle simple interactions such as this.
You then need to send a message to the server that denotes the specified message ID was seen, then broadcast to every other client that the state was changed, and update it to read - if that's needed.

Responding to Conversations async: Graph or Bot?

I have a Teams Message extension that returns a Task response which is a medium sized embedded web view iFrame
This is working successfully; including added a custom Tab within the channel and other nice magic calls to Microsoft Graph.
What I am confused about is how to do (and this is probably my not understanding the naming of things)
insert "something" Back into the Message/Post stream which is a link to newly created Tab ... like the what you get when you have a "configureTabs" style Tab created -- there is a friendly Message (Post) in the chat pointing to this new Tab.
do I do this with Microsoft Graph or back through the Bot?
the code that does the communication may be a different service elsewhere that is acting async ... so it needs to communicate with something somewhere with context. Confused if this is the Bot with some params or Microsoft Graph with params.
how to insert an image (rather than a link to the tab) into the Message/Post stream -- but showing the image not a link off to some random URL (ie: )
could not find any samples that do this; again, will be async as per above; but the format of the message will be a Card or something custom?
So just to be clear, a Task Response is NOT the same as a Tab, albeit that they might end up hosted in the same backend web application (and also albeit that your TAB can actual bring up your Task Response popup/iframe using the Teams javascript library).
Aside from that, in order to post something back to the channel, like when the Tab is created, there are two ways to do so:
First is to use Graph Api's Create ChatMessage option (this link is just for a channel though - not sure if your tab/task apply to group chats and/or 1-1 chats as well).
2nd Option is to have a Bot be part of your application as well. Then, when you're ready to send something to the channel, you'd effectively be sending something called a "pro-active messaging". You need to have certain reference data to do this, which you would get when the bot is installed into the channel ("conversation reference", "ServiceUrl", and so on). I describe this more in my answer at Programmatically sending a message to a bot in Microsoft Teams
With regards sending the image, either of the above would work here too, in terms of how to send the image. As to the sending of an image, you'd need to make use of one of the kinds of "Cards" (basically "richer" messages than just raw text). You can learn more about this at Introducing cards and about the types of cards for Teams at Card reference. There are a few that can be used to send an image, depending on perhaps what else you want the card to do. For instance, an Adaptive Card can send an image, some text, and an action button of some sort.
Hope that helps
To close the loop for future readers.
I used the following Microsoft Graph API docs, and the posting above, and this is working: Create chatMessage in a channel and Creating a Custom Microsoft Graph call from the SDK
The custom graph call (as it is not implemented in the .NET SDK at the time of this response) looks something like:
var convoReq = $"https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/teams/{groupId}/channels/{channelId}/messages";
var body = this.TeamsMessageFactory(newCreatedTabUrl, anotherstring).ToJson();
var postMessage = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Post, convoReq)
{
Content = new StringContent(body, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8, "application/json")
};
await _graphClient.CurrentGraphClient.AuthenticationProvider.AuthenticateRequestAsync(postMessage);
var response = await _graphClient.CurrentGraphClient.HttpProvider.SendAsync(postMessage);
if (response.IsSuccessStatusCode)
{
var content = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
return true;
}
The groupId and channelId are found elsewhere; and the TeamsMessageFactory is just some boilerplate that serialized the C# object graph for the POST request, as detailed in Create chatMessage in a channel

Return initial data on subscribe event in django graphene subscriptions

I'm trying to response to user on subscribe. By example, in a chatroom when an user connect to subscription, the subscription responses him with data (like a welcome message), but only to same user who just connect (no broadcast).
How can I do that? :(
Update: We resolve to use channels. DjangoChannelsGraphqlWs does not allow direct back messages.
Take a look at this DjangoChannelsGraphQL example. Link points to the part which is there to avoid "user self-notifications" (avoid user being notified about his own actions). You can use the same trick to send notification only to the user who made the action, e.g. who just subscribed.
Modified publish handler could look like the following:
def publish(self, info, chatroom=None):
new_msg_chatroom = self["chatroom"]
new_msg_text = self["text"]
new_msg_sender = self["sender"]
new_msg_is_greetings = self["is_greetings"]
# Send greetings message only to the user who caused it.
if new_msg_is_greetings:
if (
not info.context.user.is_authenticated
or new_msg_sender != info.context.user.username
):
return OnNewChatMessage.SKIP
return OnNewChatMessage(
chatroom=chatroom, text=new_msg_text, sender=new_msg_sender
)
I did not test the code above, so there could be issues, but I think it illustrates the idea quite well.

Understanding the Name of an Activity

I have a chatbot which is trying to mimic the backchannel example.
Everything is mostly correct, except I'm having trouble understanding how exactly the code below is supposed to work.
botConnection.activity$
.filter(function (activity) {
console.log("show me the activity name passed" + activity.name);
return activity.type === 'event' && activity.name === 'changeBackground';
})
.subscribe(function (activity) {
changeBackgroundColor(activity.value);
});
I'm assuming I need to name something changeBackground within my bot perhaps? Also shouldn't the activity.type be a 'message' instead of event?
When I do a console.log to show me the activity.name every message I pass is "undefined". Where exactly do I set the name of the Activity so that I can fire the Change Background?
An activity is a generic envelope of which message (text and/or attachments sent between the user and the bot) is the most common type. If you wish to have your client and bot exchange information invisibly to the user then you can use the event type. By convention they will be ignored by clients such as Web Chat.
The way it's written, your example code logs every activity sent from the bot to the client. The field name applies to activities of type event but not message, which is why it's showing as undefined.
In this example changeBackground is the name of a client function that would do something whenever the bot sends an activity of type event.
The piece you're missing right now is the (server) bot code which actually sends that event. See Ryan Volum's backchannel sample bot for an example of this.

Parse Background Job can send a message to all users currently logged in?

I am new to Parse and I want to know if there is a way to schedule a Background job that starts every 3 minutes and sends a message (an integer or something) to all users that at that moment are logged in. I could not find any help here reading the guide. I hope someone can help me here.
I was in need to push information for all logged in users in several apps which were built with Parse.com.
None of the solutions introduced earlier by Emilio, because we were in need to trigger some live event for logged users only.
So we decided to work with PubNub within CloudCode in Parse : http://www.pubnub.com/blog/realtime-collaboration-sync-parse-api-pubnub/
Our strategy is to open a "channel" available for all users, and if a user is active (logged in), we are pushing to this dedicated "channel" some information which are triggered by the app, and create some new events or call to action.
This is a sample code to send information to a dedicated channel :
Parse.Cloud.define("sendPubNubMessage", function(request, response) {
var message = JSON.stringify(request.params.message);
var PubNubUrl;
var PubNubKeys;
Parse.Config.get().then(function(config) {
PubNubKeys = config.get('PubNubkeys');
}).then(function() {
PubNubUrl = 'https://pubsub.pubnub.com/publish/';
PubNubUrl+= PubNubKeys.Publish_Key + '/';
PubNubUrl+= PubNubKeys.Subscribe_Key + '/0/';
PubNubUrl+= request.params.channel +'/0/';
PubNubUrl+= message;
return Parse.Cloud.httpRequest({
url: PubNubUrl,
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/json;charset=utf-8'
}
}).then(function(httpResponse) {
return httpResponse;
});
}).then(function(httpResponse) {
response.success(httpResponse.text);
}, function(error) {
response.error(error);
});
});
This is an another sample code used to send a message to a dedicated channel once something was changed on a specific class :
Parse.Cloud.afterSave("your_class", function(request, response) {
if (!request.object.existed()) {
Parse.Cloud.run('sendPubNubMessage', {
'message': JSON.stringify({
'collection': 'sample',
'objectId': request.object.id
}),
'channel' : 'all' // could be request.object.get('user').id
});
}
});
#Toucouleur is right in suggesting PubNub for your Parse project. PubNub acts essentially like an open socket between client and server so that the sever can send messages to clients and vice versa. There are 70+ SDKs supported, including one here for Win Phone.
One approach for your problem would be to Subscribe all users to a Channel when they log in, and Unsubscribe from that Channel when they exit the app or timeout.
When you want to send a message you can publish to a Channel and all users Subscribed will receive that message in < 1/4 second. PubNub makes sending those messages as Push Notifications really simple as well.
Another feature you may find useful is "Presence" which can give you realtime information about who is currently Subscribed to your "Channel".
If you think a code sample would help let me know!
Here's a few ideas I came up with.
Send a push notification to all users, but don't add an alert text. No alert will show for users who have the app closed and you can handle the alert in the App Delegate. Disadvantage: Uses a lot of push notifications, and not all of them are going to be used.
When the app comes to foreground, add a flag to the PFInstallation object that specifies the user is online, when it goes to the background, set the flag to false. Send a push notification to the installations that have the flag set to true. Disadvantages: If the app crashes, you would be sending notifications to users that are not online. Updating the user twice per session can increase your Parse request count.
Add a new property to the PFInstallation object where you store the last time a user did something, you can also set it on a timer of 30s/1m while the app is open. Send a push notification to users that have been active in the last 30s/1m. Disadvantage: Updating the PFInstallation every 30 seconds might cause an increase on your Parse request count. More accuracy (smaller interval) means more requests. The longer the session length of your users, the more requests you will use.

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