For learning purposes, I'm developing an app in app inventor 2 which should send to myself an SMS message with a list of bills with due date equals the current day -1. In other words, if the bill due date is tomorrow, it should send me an SMS today.
I already got the list of bills from tinyDB and I tried use clock.timer() to trigger the SMS. But the problem is when the clock triggers the SMS it sends a lot of messages and do not stop. I want it be sent only one time.
If you want to receive the SMS when the app is closed, you will need to look into app inventor services.
...which should send to myself an SMS message with a list of bills with due date equals the current day -1.
It would help if you provide a screenshot of your relevant blocks, but shouldn't it be the current day +1? The current day -1 would be yesterday. That would explain why you keep getting the message and it doesn't stop.
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Background
A workflow I have allows users to book meetings. The time/day of the meeting is stored in a table along with other details like the email address.
I send them an email reminder 30 minutes in advance.
Problem
In order to send them an email, a recurring event is set up once a week to go through the table and schedule the email to be sent on time - 30 minutes.
I've added the ability to reschedule the meeting. The problem that creates is that the emails are already scheduled, so users get the reminders at the original time, which is confusing.
What I want to do
I want to be able to send them the email at the rescheduled time, but there are technical limitations to the platform I use, which are:
I cannot set up cron/recurring more frequently than every day. This would probably be better than every week, but if someone rescheduled within the day, they would still get the wrong email.
I cannot remove scheduled events - so any recurring events-based workflow would still send the original email.
I know - this is pretty limiting, but am I even approaching this in the right way?
given your constraints, I'd probably go with 'resign'.
But in all seriousness, if you can't remove scheduled events (and I'm guessing you can't 'move' them because this is too advanced for your CTO to get their head around) then the only way I see it is to break the email send process into two steps - send scheduled event to PROXY in-front of your email sender, check if there is another event (i.e. can you add some 'cancelled/moved to data to the original one) and if so don't send it.
We are implementing an SMS tracking feature for our app using Twilio where we will send an SMS to our customer and once they reply with Yes/No
we will take action accordingly. For normal case, where each customer has one single phone number we can easily track the replies and
take action. But if the customer use the same phone number for multiple accounts and we send multiple SMS to the same customer
(eventually in a same phone number) we are not able to track which specific SMS they have replied for.
Lets take an example,
User Tom has three accounts with us. Each of the three accounts uses the same phone number P.
Twilio SMS are tracked by a combination of From/To pair.
Assuming, we are using one Twilio proxy number as sending number which is S.
Case 1: Tom has one booking canceled for a short notice period. An SMS has been sent from S->P. When a reply is received, we can easily track the reply and take the action.
Case 2: Tom has two or more bookings canceled due to a short notice period.
For each canceled booking, an SMS has been sent from S->P. When the user replies, we are unable to detect which booking to mark the reply for.
It is not possible to know which message a person has responded to in SMS. The only way to efficiently handle this is to send messages from different numbers. So, if a user signs up with the same phone number as another user then you need to assign a new Twilio number to them. Then you can tell which user you are contacting or receiving messages from by the number.
If you send out messages about bookings on the same account at the same time, then you need to be even more granular with the number access. Each notification should assign a number to use and then when a reply comes to that number it was about that notification. Then if you need to send a second message simultaneously, you attach a different Twilio number to it. And so on for more messages.
I'm working on architecting a micro-service solution where most code will be C# and most likely Angular for any front end. My question is about message chaining. I am still figuring out what message broker to use; Azure Service Bus , RabbitMQ, etc.. There is a concept which I haven't found much about.
How do I handle cases when I want to fire a message when a specific set of messages have fired. An example but not part of my actual solution: I want to say Notify someone when pays a bill. We send a message "PAIDBILL"
which will fire off microservices which will be processed independently:
FinanceService to Debit the ledger and fire "PaymentPosted"
EmailService: email Customer Saying thank you for paying the bill
"CustomerPaymentEmailSent"
DiscountService: Check if they get a discount for paying on time then send
"CustomerCanGetPaymentDiscount"
If all three messages have fired for the Same PAIDBILL: Message "PaymentPosted", "CustomerPaymentEmailSent", "CustomerCanGetPaymentDiscount"
then I want to email the customer that they will get a discount on their next bill. It Must be done AFTER all three have tiggered and the order doesn't matter. How do I Schedule a new message to be sent "EmailNextTimeDiscount" message, without having to poll for what messages have fired every minute, hour, day?
All I can think of is to have a SQL table which marks that each one is complete (by locking the table) and when the last one is filled then send off the message. Would this be a good solution? I find it an anti-pattern for the micro-service & message queue design.
If you're using messages (e.g. Service Bus / RabbitMQ), then I think the solution you have described is the best one. This type of design - where services have knowledge about the other domains in the system - is typically known as choreography.
You'll want to pick a service which will be responsible for this business logic. That service will need to receive all the preceding types of messages so that it can determine when (if) all have been met, which it probably wants to do by recording which of the gates have already passed in a database.
One alternative you could consider is chaining the business processes instead of doing them in parallel. So...
PAYBILL causes FinanceService to Debit the ledger and fire "PaymentPosted"
"PayentPosted" causes EmailService to email Customer Saying thank you for paying the bill and broadcasts "CustomerPaymentEmailSent"
"CustomerPaymentEmailSent" causes DicsountService to check if they get a discount for paying on Time then sends "CustomerCanGetPaymentDiscount"
The email you want to send is just triggered by "CustomerCanGetPaymentDiscount".
If I'm honest, I would switch around the dependency model you're using at this last stage. So, instead of some component listening for "CustomerCanGetPaymentDiscount" events from DiscountService and sending an email, I think I would instead have the DiscountService tell some other component to send an email. It seems natural to me for something that calculates discounts to know that an email should be sent. It seems less natural for something that sends emails to know about discounts (and everything else that needs emails sent). This is why I don't like architectures where the assumption is that every message should be an event and every action should be triggered by an event: it removes a lot of decisions about where domain logic can live, because the message receiver always has to know about the domain of the message sender, never vice versa.
I have a channel in slack, to which a CI tool sends notification. The CI tool sends notification for failure for every operation and there is no way to filter it out. But I know that important notifications come from 12 AM to 2 AM. Is there a way that I can apply a filter daily on that channel between two time intervals ?
Yes. you can call the API method conversations.history, which will return messages from a channel. By settings the parameters oldest and latest accordingly you will only get messages from a specified timeframe.
Note that those parameters are provided as absolute timestamps (e.g. 1234567890.123456), so you need to calculate them for the current day.
Our scenario is as follows:
We have a marketplace where sellers will receive multiple messages throughout the day from users.
We want to send message notifications etc via sms to sellers
We would like sellers to be able to reply to a sms message notification on their phone. We want what they text to appear as their reply on our site. Is this possible?
Say a seller checks their phone as sees that they have 5 notifications, is there a way they can reply to a specific message rather than the last one sent?
Any help would be much appreciated.
As you describe the use case, it is not possible. As you suspect, there's no way to link one inbound message to a particular outbound message. I'd suggest borrowing an idea from Twitter and including a Base-36 code in the notification. If a reply contains that code, then it's in response to that original message. For example...
Notitification: A seller is interested in your widget. LFLR
Reply: #LFLR Sorry. We are sold out of the widgets.
It will take a slight bit of effort from the sellers. But, then, they are motivated to sell. Using a Base-36 code will keep the number of characters to type under five even for a million plus messages.