How can a bot send text messages to a random list of users?

[peterbailey]

I need a bot I am writing to send a text message to a variable list of users based on logic I have written. I can't find any examples of this type of thing anywhere. Is there a simple way of doing this. I would be executing out of bot that hears a message like "go do some work". Inside the handler for that, I determine the users that should receive a text and then I want to send the same text message to all of them.

Is there an example of something like this anywhere, or is there something in the docs that I missed?

Thanks,

Peter

[dstaudt]

If you want to send a text meaning to an IP phone's display, see the <ciscoipphoneexecute> object and POSTing messages to phones in the IP Phone Services SDK: https://developer.cisco.com/site/ip-phone-services/

If you mean via Webex Teams, there are a number of learning labs that cover chat-ops and automating sending messages here: https://developer.cisco.com/learning/tracks/devnet-express-cloud-collab-it-pro

If referring to SMS, you'll need to look to an outside service, something like Twilio...

[peterbailey]

Thanks for the reply dstaudt.

I'm a total newbie with this stuff, so sorry for dumb questions. I am a javascript programmer and was asked by a friend if I could help him implement a few things, but this environment is something new for me....

So, the scenario I am talking about is that my bot will accept a command to do something from a windows jabber client (that part is basically working), and from that transaction, I will decide on several users to message. They are not on windows jabber, but have jabber for android or ios. on their mobile devices.

Can I send a text message to this list of users and have it work with their jabber mobile app?

Thanks again,

Peter

[dstaudt · Accepted solution]

That should be quite possible.  If you are already successfully using Botkit, then this should be very easy - just use the 'bot.say()' command, providing the Jabber user ID as the 'channel' parameter: https://botkit.ai/docs/v0/core.html#botsay.  Do this in a loop for each target user...

Note, Botkit has just launched a new/refactored version based on the MS bot framework in its 'master' branch in the Botkit repo - however the Jabber functionality has not yet been ported there.  I believe you can still use the 0.7.4 version directly by downloading: https://github.com/howdyai/botkit/releases/tag/v0.7.4

[peterbailey]

Thanks again, I''ll try that. Thought it might be something along those lines but it seemed too easy and I was unclear about the channel.

Cheers

[peterbailey]

So I am trying this and the code is below. I am not getting any errors on sending, but the users I am targeting for messages are receiving nothing. Is there something else I need to do? 

function message_users(bot, users, roomToClean, cleaning_type) {

for (let i = 0; i < users.length; i++ ) {

   let cleaner = users[i] + emailDomain;  // so this is of the form user@domain.com

                                                             // without the /jabber_11352   - part of the resource - should not affect delivery?

   console.log('in message_users - cleaner = ' + cleaner);

   try {

      bot.say(

          {

             text: 'Clean room ' + roomToClean + 'Type: ' + cleaning_type, 

             channel: cleaner

         }

      );

   }

   catch (err) {

      log_event('Error in message_users: ' + err);

   }

 }

}

[peterbailey]

Does anyone here know how this works. No errors, but the messages are not received by the intended user - Super frustrating...