FOSSASIA

Read more about the article Adding Fallback Images in SUSI.AI Skill CMS

Adding Fallback Images in SUSI.AI Skill CMS

SUSI.AI Skill CMS shows image of a every skill. Here we are going to talk about a special case, where we handle the case when image is not found. We will be discussing the author’s skill component(all the skills by an author) and how we added fallback image in order to handle all the cases. For displaying image in table displaying all skills of author, we provide the path of image in SUSI Skill Data repository. The path is provided as follows :

let image = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fossasia/susi_skill_data/master/models/general/'+ parse[6]+'/'+parse[7]+'/images/'+parse[8].split('.')[0];

Explanation:
parse is the array which contains the models, language ISO code, and the name of the skill. This is obtained after parsing JSON from this endpoint :

"http://api.susi.ai/cms/getSkillsByAuthor.json?author=" + author;
  • parse[6]: This represents a model of the skill. There are currently six models Assistants, Entertainment, Knowledge, Problem Solving, Shopping and Small Talks.
  • parse[7]: This represents ISO language code of the skill.
  • parse[8]: This represents the name of the skill.

Now the image variable just needs the file extension. We have .jpg and .png extensions in images in our skill data repository. So we made two images :

let image1 = image + '.png';
let image2 = image + '.jpg';

The img tag only takes one attribute in src and we can only add a string in alt tag. Now we needed to check which image exists and add proper src. This can be solved by following methods:

We can use Jquery to solve this:

$.get(image_url)
        .done(function() { 
                // image exists
        }).fail(function() { 
                // Image doesn't exist
    })

This will result in more code and and also this does not handles the case where no image is found and we need to show the Circle Image component which takes first two letters of skill and make a circular component. After researching the internet we found a perfect solution to our problem. There is an npm package named react-image, which is an alternative to default img tag. Features of react-image package helpful to us are:

  • We can provide multiple fallback images in an array as source which will be used in order of index of array. This feature solves our problem of extensions, we add provide image with all extensions.
  • We can show a fallback element in case no images are loaded. This solves our second problem where we needed to show Circle Image component.

Code looks like this:

<Img
  style={imageStyle}
  src={[
       image1,
       image2
      ]}
  unloader={<CircleImage name={name} size="40"/>}
 />

Resources:

Continue ReadingAdding Fallback Images in SUSI.AI Skill CMS
Read more about the article Implementing a Custom Serializer for Yaydoc

Implementing a Custom Serializer for Yaydoc

At the crux of it, Yaydoc is comprised of a number of specialized bash scripts which perform various tasks such as generating documentation, publishing it to github pages, heroku, etc. These bash scripts also serve as the central communication portal for various technologies used in Yaydoc. The core generator is composed of several Python modules extending the sphinx documentation generator. The web Interface has been built using Node, Express, etc. Yaydoc also contains a Python package dedicated to reading configuration options from a Yaml file.

Till now the options were read and then converted to strings irrespective of the actual data type, based on some simple rules.

  • List was converted to a comma separated string.(Nested lists were not handled)
  • Boolean values were converted to true | false respectively.
  • None was converted to an empty string.

While these simple rules were enough at that time, It was certain that a better solution would be required as the project grew in size. It was also getting tough to maintain because a lot of hard-coding was required when we wanted to convert those strings to python objects. To handle these cases, I decided to create a custom serialization format which would be simple for our use cases and easily parseable from a bash script yet can handle all edge cases. The format is mostly similar to its earlier form apart from lists where it takes heavy inspiration from the python language itself.

With the new implementation, Lists would get converted to comma separated strings enclosed by square brackets. This allowed us to encode the type of the object in the string so that it can later be decoded. This handled the case of an empty list or a list with single element well. The implementation also handled nested lists.

Two methods were created namely serialize and deserialize which detected the type of the corresponding object using several heuristics and applied the proper serialization or deserialization rule.

def serialize(value):
    """
    Serializes a python object to a string.
    None is serialized to an empty string.
    bool values are converted to strings True False.
    list or tuples are recursively handled and are comma separated.
    """
    if value is None:
        return ''
    if isinstance(value, str):
        return value
    if isinstance(value, bool):
        return "true" if value else "false"
    if isinstance(value, (list, tuple)):
        return '[' + ','.join(serialize(_) for _ in value) + ']'
    return str(value)

To deserialize we also had to handle the case of nested lists. The following snippet does that properly.

def deserialize(value, numeric=True):
    """
    Deserializes a string to a python object.
    Strings True False are converted to bools.
    `numeric` controls whether strings should be converted to
    ints or floats if possible. List strings are handled recursively.
    """
    if value.lower() in ("true", "false"):
        return value.lower() == "true"
    if numeric and _is_numeric(value):
        return _to_numeric(value)
    if value.startswith('[') and value.endswith(']'):
        split = []
        element = ''
        level = 0
        for c in value:
            if c == '[':
                level += 1
                if level != 1:
                    element += c
            elif c == ']':
                if level != 1:
                    element += c
                level -= 1
            elif c == ',' and level == 1:
                split.append(element)
                element = ''
            else:
                element += c
        if split or element:
            split.append(element)
        return [deserialize(_, numeric) for _ in split]
    return value

With this new approach, we are able to handle much more cases as compared to the previous implementation and is much more robust. It does however still lacks lacks certain features such as serializing dictionaries. That may be be implemented in the future if need be.

Resources

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Read more about the article Using Order Endpoints in Open Event API Server

Using Order Endpoints in Open Event API Server

The main feature i.e., Ordering API is added into API server. These endpoints provide the ability to work with the ordering system. This API is not simple like other as it checks for the discount codes and various other things as well.
The process in layman terms is very simple, first, a user must be registered or added as an attendee into Server without any order_id associated and then the attendee details will be sent to API server as a relationship.

Things needed to take care:

  1. Validating the discount code and ensure it is not exhausted
  2. Calculating the total amount on the server side by applying coupon
  3. Do not calculate amount if the user is the event admin
  4. Do not use coupon if user is event admin
  5. Handling payment modes and generating payment links
  6. Ensure that default status is always pending, unless the user is event admin

Creating Order

    • Prerequisite
      Before initiating the order, attendee records needs to be created associated with the event. These records will not have any order_id associated with them initially. The Order API will add the relationships.
    • Required Body
      Order API requires you to send event relationship and attendee records to create order_tickets
    • Permissions
      Only organizers can provide custom amount and status. Others users will get their status as pending and amount will be recalculated in server. The response will reflect the calculated amount and updated status.
      Also to initiate any order, user must be logged in. Guest can not create any order
    • Payment Modes
      There are three payment modes, free, stripe and paypal. If payment_mode is not provided then API will consider it as “free”.
    • Discount Codes
      Discount code can be sent as a relationship to the API. The Server will validate the code and will act accordingly.

Validating Discount Codes

Discount codes are checked to ensure they are valid, first check ensures that the user is not co-organizer

# Apply discount only if the user is not event admin
if data.get('discount') and not has_access('is_coorganizer', event_id=data['event']):

Second, check ensures that the discount code is active

if not discount_code.is_active:
  raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': 'discount_code_id'}, "Inactive Discount Code")

The third, Check ensures its validity is not expired

if not (valid_from <= now <= valid_till):
  raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': 'discount_code_id'}, "Inactive Discount Code")

Fourth Check ensure that the quantity is not exhausted

if not TicketingManager.match_discount_quantity(discount_code, data['ticket_holders']):
  raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': 'discount_code_id'}, 'Discount Usage Exceeded')

Lastly, the fifth check ensures that event id matches with given discount associated event

if discount_code.event.id != data['event'] and discount_code.user_for == TICKET:
  raise UnprocessableEntity({'source': 'discount_code_id'}, "Invalid Discount Code")

Calculating Order Amount

The next important thing is to recalculate the order amount and it will calculated only if user is not the event admin 

if not has_access('is_coorganizer', **view_kwargs):
  TicketingManager.calculate_update_amount(order)

API Response

The API response apart from general fields will provide you the payment-url depending upon the payment mode you selected.

  • Stripe : will give payment-url as stripe
  • Paypal: will provide the payment completing url in payment-url

This all explains the flow and requirements to create an order. Order API consists of many more things related with TIcketing Manager which works to create the payment url and apply discount count as well as calculate the total order amount.

Resources

  1. Stripe Payments API Docs
    https://stripe.com/docs/api
  2. Paypal Payments API docs
    https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/
  3. Paypal Sandbox docs
    https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/lifecycle/ug_sandbox/

 

Continue ReadingUsing Order Endpoints in Open Event API Server
Read more about the article Displaying Blog Posts on SUSI AI Web Chat’s Blog Page and Share Posts

Displaying Blog Posts on SUSI AI Web Chat’s Blog Page and Share Posts

FOSSASIA is maintaining a superior blog and it contains blog posts about projects and programs run by FOSSASIA. While we were implementing SUSI Web Chat Application we got a requirement to implement a blog page. Speciality of this blog page is it is not a separate blog page, it fetches blog posts and other related data by filtering the FOSSASIA’s main blog.

In this blog post I’ll discuss how we fetched and managed those data on front-end and how we made the appearance same as the FOSSASIA main blog.

First we get blog posts as a JSON. For that we used rss2json API. we can get the RSS feed as a JSON by sending our RSS feed URL to the rss2json API. Check the rss2json API documentation here.

It produces all posts as items array. Next we store this array of responses in our application as a state.

This response contains blog post titles featured images’ details and post content and other metadata such as tags, author name and published date.

We had few requirements to fulfill. First one is to show full content of the blogpost in a new blog page.

We can take the full content from response like this,

this.state.posts.slice(this.state.startPage, this.state.startPage + 10).map((posts, i) => {
        let content = posts.content;
})

We can use “cintent” variable to show content but it contains the featured image. We have to skip that image. For that,

let htmlContent = content.replace(/<img.*?>/, '');

Now we have to render this string value as HTML. For that we have to install “test-to-html” package using below command.

npm install html-to-text --save

Now we can convert text into html like this

htmlContent = renderHTML(htmlContent);

We used this HTML content inside the “CardText” tag.

<CardText> {htmlContent}
</CardText>

At the bottom of the post we needed to show author name, tags list and categories list.
Since tags and categories come in one array, we have to separate them.
First we defined an array which contains all the categories in Fossasia blog. Then we compared that array with the categories we got like this.

       const allCategories = ['FOSSASIA','GSoC','SUSI.AI']

Compare two arrays,

          posts.categories.map((cat) => {
                let k = 0;
                for (k = 0; k < allCategories.length; k++) {
                              if (cat === allCategories[k]) {
                                  category.push(cat);
                              }
              	}
          });

we defined this “arrDiff” simple function to get the difference of two arrays.

     var tags=arrDiff(category,posts.categories)

Make the list of categories

let fCategory=category.map((cat) =>
<span key={cat} ><a className="tagname" href={'https://blog.fossasia.org/category/' + cat.replace(/\s+/g, '-').toLowerCase()} rel="noopener noreferrer">{cat}</a></span>
   );

We can use above step to make tags list.

Then after used it in the “CardActions”

<span className='categoryContainer'>
    <i className="fa fa-folder-open-o tagIcon"></i>
    {fCategory}
</span>

 

According to the final requirement we needed to add social media share buttons for Facebook and Twitter.

If we need to make a twitter share button we have to follow up this method. But we can use “react-share” npm package to make these kind of share buttons.

This is how we made Facebook and Twitter share buttons. First of all we have to install “react-share” package using below command.

npm install react-share --save

Then we have to import the installed package.

import { ShareButtons, generateShareIcon } from 'react-share';

Then after we defined Button and Icon like this.

      const {FacebookShareButton,TwitterShareButton} = ShareButtons;
      const FacebookIcon = generateShareIcon('facebook');
      const TwitterIcon = generateShareIcon('twitter');

Now we can use these components.

<TwitterShareButton url={posts.guid} title={posts.title} via='asksusi' hashtags={posts.categories.slice(0, 4)} >                                                                                <TwitterIcon size={32} round={true} />
</TwitterShareButton>
<FacebookShareButton url={posts.link}>
     <FacebookIcon size={32} round={true} />
</FacebookShareButton>

We have to send URL and title of the post with the tweet and tags as hashtags. So we have to pass them into the component as above.
Above code produces this model of tweets.

That’s how “text-to-htm”l and “react-share” works on react. If you would like to contribute to SUSI project or any other FOSSASIA project please fork our repositories on github.

Resources:

Continue ReadingDisplaying Blog Posts on SUSI AI Web Chat’s Blog Page and Share Posts
Read more about the article Adding Sticky Headers for Grouping Sponsors List in Open Event Android App

Adding Sticky Headers for Grouping Sponsors List in Open Event Android App

The Open Event Android project has a fragment for showing sponsors of the event. Each Sponsor model has a name, url, type and level. The SponsorsFragment shows list according to type and level. Each sponsor list item has sponsor type TextView. There can be more than one sponsors with the same type. So instead of showing type in the Sponsor item we can add Sticky header showing type at the top which will group the sponsors with the same type and also gives the great UI. In this post I explain how to add the Sticky headers in the RecyclerView using StickyHeadersRecyclerView library.

1. Add dependency

In order to use Sticky Headers in your app add following dependencies in your app module’s build.gradle file. 

dependencies {
	compile 'com.timehop.stickyheadersrecyclerview:library:0.4.3'
}

2. Create layout for header

Create recycler_view_header.xml file for the header. It will contain LinearLayout and simple TextView which will show Sponsor type. 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:orientation="vertical">

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/recyclerview_view_header"
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:padding="@dimen/padding_medium" />

</LinearLayout>

Here you can modify layout according to your need.

3.  Implement StickyRecyclerHeadersAdapter

Now implement StickyRecyclerHeadersAdapter in the List Adapter. Override getHeaderId(), onCreateHeaderViewHolder(), onBindHeaderViewHolder
() methods of the StickyRecyclerHeadersAdapter.

public class SponsorsListAdapter extends BaseRVAdapter<Sponsor, SponsorViewHolder> implements StickyRecyclerHeadersAdapter {
    ...

    @Override
    public long getHeaderId(int position) {...}

    @Override
    public RecyclerView.ViewHolder onCreateHeaderViewHolder(ViewGroup parent) {...}

    @Override
    public void onBindHeaderViewHolder(RecyclerView.ViewHolder holder, int position) {...}
}

 

The getHeaderId() method is used to give an id to the header. It is the main part of the implementation here all the sponsors with the same type should return the same id. In our case we are returning sponsor level because all the sponsor types have corresponding levels. 

String level = getItem(position).getLevel();
return Long.valueOf(level);

 

The onCreateHeaderViewHolder() returns Recycler ViewHolder for the header. Here we will use in the inflate() method of  LayoutInflater to get View object of recycler_view_header.xml file. Then return new RecyclerView.ViewHolder object using View object.

View view = LayoutInflater.from(parent.getContext())
                .inflate(R.layout.recycler_view_header, parent, false);
return new RecyclerView.ViewHolder(view) {};

 

The onBindHeaderViewHolder() binds the sponsor to HeaderViewHolder. In this method we sets the sponsor type string to the TextView we have created in the recycler_view_header.xml file.

TextView textView = (TextView) holder.itemView.findViewById(R.id.recyclerview_view_header);
textView.setGravity(Gravity.CENTER_HORIZONTAL);

String sponsorType = getItem(position).getType();
if (!Utils.isEmpty(sponsorType))  
   textView.setText(sponsorType.toUpperCase());

Here you can also modify TextView according to your need. We are centering text using setGravity() method.

4.  Setup RecyclerView

Now create RecyclerView and set adapter using setAdapter() method. Also as we want the linear list of sponsors so set the LinearLayoutManager using setLayoutManager() method. 

SponsorsListAdapter sponsorsListAdapter = new SponsorsListAdapter(getContext(), sponsors);
sponsorsRecyclerView.setAdapter(sponsorsListAdapter);
sponsorsRecyclerView.setLayoutManager(new LinearLayoutManager(getActivity()));

 

Create StickyRecyclerHeadersDecoration object and add it in the RecyclerView using addItemDecoration() method.

final StickyRecyclerHeadersDecoration headersDecoration = new StickyRecyclerHeadersDecoration(sponsorsListAdapter);

sponsorsRecyclerView.addItemDecoration(headersDecoration);
sponsorsListAdapter.registerAdapterDataObserver(new RecyclerView.AdapterDataObserver(){
    @Override
    public void onChanged {
            headersDecoration.invalidateHeaders();
    }
});

Now add AdapterDataObserver using registerAdapterDataObserver() method. The onChanged() method in this observer is called whenever dataset changes. So in this method invalidate headers using invalidateHeaders() method of HeaderDecoration.

Now we are all set. Run the app it will look like this.

Conclusion

Sticky headers in the App gives great UI and UX. You can also add a click listener to the headers. To know more about Sticky Headers follow the links given below.

Continue ReadingAdding Sticky Headers for Grouping Sponsors List in Open Event Android App
Read more about the article Sorting Users and Implementing Animations on SUSI Web Chat Team Page

Sorting Users and Implementing Animations on SUSI Web Chat Team Page

While we were developing the chat application, we wanted to show details of Developers.  So we planned to build a team page for SUSI Web Chat Application. In this post I discuss few things we built there. Like sorting feature, animations of the page, usage of Material UI.

First we made an array of objects to store user details. In that array we grouped them in sub arrays so we can refer them in different sections separately. We stored following data in “TeamList.js” in an array.

var team = [{
 'mentors': [{
   'name': 'Mario Behling',
   'github': 'http://github.com/mariobehling',
   'avatar': 'http://fossasia.org/img/mariobehling.jpg',
   'twitter': 'https://twitter.com/mariobehling',
   'linkedin': 'https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariobehling/',
   'blog': '#'
 }]
},{ 'server': [{
    }]
}

There was a requirement to sort developers by their name so we had to build a way to sort out array data which are in main array. This is how we built that.
The function we are going to use for sorting.

   function compare(a, b) {
     if (a.name < b.name) { return -1; }
     if (a.name > b.name) { return 1; }
     return 0;
   }

This is how we have used it to sort developers.

import team from './TeamList';
team[1].server.sort(compare);

In this function we took values of object two by two and compared.
Now we have to show these sorted information on view.
Extract data that we want from array and we used material UI Cards to show these data on view.
This is how we extracted data from the array.

   team[1].server.sort(compare);
   let server = team[1].server.map((serv, i) => {
     return ( <Card className='team-card' key={i}>
         <CardMedia className="container" >
           <img src={serv.avatar} alt={serv.name} className="image" />
           <div className="overlay" >
             <div className="text"> <FourButtons member={serv} /> </div>
           </div>
         </CardMedia>
         <CardTitle title={serv.name} subtitle={serv.designation} />
       </Card>)   })

Now it shows data on the view.
“” contains an image of the member. We need to show social media links of the user on mouseover. We did that using simple CSS. I added a block comment around those particular styles. Check those styles here.

.overlay {
 position: absolute;
 bottom: 100%;
 left: 0;
 right: 0;
 background-color: #000;
 overflow: hidden;
 width: 100%;
 height:0;
 transition: .3s ease;
 opacity:0;
}
.container:hover .overlay {
 bottom: 0;
 height: 100%;
 opacity:0.7;
}

Above lines show that how we made the animation of the overlay animation.

Now we want to show social media buttons on the overlay. We made another separate component for buttons and return those like this.

render() {
       let member= this.props.member;
       return (<div>
         <CardActions>
           <IconButton href={member.github} target="_blank" >
  <CardActions>
		</div>)}

Finally we showed those data on Team page. We returned these JSX from render(){} method.

         <div className="team-header">
           <div className="support__heading">Developers</div>
         </div>
         <div className='team-container'>{server}</div>

I have mentioned few resources which I used to implement these features. If you are willing to contribute SUSI AI Web Chat application. Fork our repository on github.

Resources

Documentation of Array.sort https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/sort

How to use Image overlay CSS effects: https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_image_overlay.asp

Continue ReadingSorting Users and Implementing Animations on SUSI Web Chat Team Page
Read more about the article Preparing for Automatic Publishing of Android Apps in Play Store

Preparing for Automatic Publishing of Android Apps in Play Store

I spent this week searching through libraries and services which provide a way to publish built apks directly through API so that the repositories for Android apps can trigger publishing automatically after each push on master branch. The projects to be auto-deployed are:

I had eyes on fastlane for a couple of months and it came out to be the best solution for the task. The tool not only allows publishing of APK files, but also Play Store listings, screenshots, and changelogs. And that is only a subset of its capabilities bundled in a subservice supply.

There is a process before getting started to use this service, which I will go through step by step in this blog. The process is also outlined in the README of the supply project.

Enabling API Access

The first step in the process is to enable API access in your Play Store Developer account if you haven’t done so. For that, you have to open the Play Dev Console and go to Settings > Developer Account > API access.

If this is the first time you are opening it, you’ll be presented with a confirmation dialog detailing about the ramifications of the action and if you agree to do so. Read carefully about the terms and click accept if you agree with them. Once you do, you’ll be presented with a setting panel like this:

Creating Service Account

As you can see there is no registered service account here and we need to create one. So, click on CREATE SERVICE ACCOUNT button and this dialog will pop up giving you the instructions on how to do so:

So, open the highlighted link in the new tab and Google API Console will open up, which will look something like this:

Click on Create Service Account and fill in these details:

Account Name: Any name you want

Role: Project > Service Account Actor

And then, select Furnish a new private key and select JSON. Click CREATE.

A new JSON key will be created and downloaded on your device. Keep this secret as anyone with access to it can at least change play store listings of your apps if not upload new apps in place of existing ones (as they are protected by signing keys).

Granting Access

Now return to the Play Console tab (we were there in Figure 2 at the start of Creating Service Account), and click done as you have created the Service Account now. And you should see the created service account listed like this:

Now click on grant access, choose Release Manager from Role dropdown, and select these PERMISSIONS:

Of course you don’t want the fastlane API to access financial data or manage orders. Other than that it is up to you on what to allow or disallow. Same choice with expiry date as we have left it to never expire. Click on ADD USER and you’ll see the Release Manager created in the user list like below:

Now you are ready to use the fastlane service, or any other release management service for that matter.

Using fastlane

Install fastlane by

sudo gem install fastlane

Go to your project folder and run

fastlane supply init

First it will ask the location of the private key JSON file you downloaded, and then the package name of the application you are trying to initialize fastlane for.

Then it will create metadata folder with listing information excluding the images. So you’ll have to download and place the images manually for the first time

After modifying the listing, images or APK, run the command:

fastlane supply run

That’s it. Your app along with the store listing has been updated!

This is a very brief introduction to the capabilities of the supply service. All interactive options can be supplied via command line arguments, certain parts of the metadata can be omitted and alpha beta management along with release rollout can be done in steps! Make sure to check out the links below:

Continue ReadingPreparing for Automatic Publishing of Android Apps in Play Store
Read more about the article Deploying preview using surge in Yaydoc

Deploying preview using surge in Yaydoc

In Yaydoc, we save the preview of the documentation in our local server and then we show the preview using express’s static serve method. But the problem is that Heroku doesn’t support persistent server, so our preview link gets expired within a few minutes. In order to solve the problem I planned to deploy the preview to surge so that the preview doesn’t get expired. For that I made a shell script which will deploy preview to the surge and then I’ll invoke the shell script using child_process.

#!/bin/bash

while getopts l:t:e:u: option
do
 case "${option}"
 in
 l) LOGIN=${OPTARG};;
 t) TOKEN=${OPTARG};;
 e) EMAIL=${OPTARG};;
 u) UNIQUEID=${OPTARG};;
 esac
done

export SURGE_LOGIN=${LOGIN}
export SURGE_TOKEN=${TOKEN}

./node_modules/.bin/surge --project temp/${EMAIL}/${UNIQUEID}_preview --domain ${UNIQUEID}.surge.sh

In the above snippet, I’m initializing the SURGE_LOGIN and SURGE_TOKEN environmental value, so that surge will deploy to the preview without asking any credentials while I am deploying the project. Then I’m executing surge by specifying the preview path and preview domain name.

exports.deploySurge = function(data, surgeLogin, surgeToken, callback) {
  var args = [
    "-l", surgeLogin,
    "-t", surgeToken,
    "-e", data.email,
    "-u", data.uniqueId
  ];

  var spawnedProcess = spawn('./surge_deploy.sh', args);
  spawnedProcess.on('exit', function(code) {
    if (code === 0) {
      callback(null, {description: 'Deployed successfully'});
    } else {
      callback({description: 'Unable to deploy'}, null);
    }
  });
}

Whenever the user generates documentation, I’ll invoke the shell script using child_process and then if it exits with exit code 0 I’ll pass the preview url via sockets to frontend and then the user can access the url.

Resource:

Continue ReadingDeploying preview using surge in Yaydoc
Read more about the article Using Firebase Test Lab for Testing test cases of Phimpme Android

Using Firebase Test Lab for Testing test cases of Phimpme Android

As now we started writing some test cases for Phimpme Android. While running my instrumentation test case, I saw a tab of Cloud Testing in Android Studio. This is for Firebase Test Lab. Firebase Test Lab provides cloud-based infrastructure for testing Android apps. Everyone doesn’t have every devices of all the android versions. But testing on all of them is equally important.

How I used test lab in Phimpme

  • Run your first test on Firebase

Select Test Lab in your project on the left nav on the Firebase console, and then click Run a Robo test. The Robo test automatically explores your app on wide array of devices to find defects and report any crashes that occur. It doesn’t require you to write test cases. All you need is the app’s APK. Nothing else is needed to use Robo test.

Upload your Application’s APK (app-debug-unaligned.apk) in the next screen and click Continue

Configure the device selection, a wide range of devices and all API levels are present there. You can save the template for future use.

Click on start test to start testing. It will start the tests and show the real time progress as well.

  • Using Firebase Test Lab from Android Studio

It required Android Studio 2.0+. You needs to edit the configuration of Android Instrumentation test.

Select the Firebase Test Lab Device Matrix under the Target. You can configure Matrix, matrix is actually on what virtual and physical devices do you want to run your test. See the below screenshot for details.

Note: You need to enable the firebase in your project

So using test lab on firebase we can easily test the test cases on multiple devices and make our app more scalable.

Resources:

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Read more about the article Making SUSI.AI reach more users through messenger bots

Making SUSI.AI reach more users through messenger bots

SUSI.AI learns from the queries asked to it by the users. More are the number of queries asked, the better is the learning by SUSI.AI. More are the number of users involved with SUSI.AI, better is the amount of content available to SUSI to learn from. Now, the challenge in front of us is to indulge more users with SUSI.AI. In this blog post, SUSI Tweetbot and SUSI FBbot are used as examples to show how we increase our user base through messenger bots.

Twitter:

Twitter has a 328 million user base according to this article’s data. Integration of SUSI.AI to just Twitter makes it available to around 300 million users. Even if some percentage of these users start using SUSI.AI, increase in the user base of SUSI.AI could be exponential. Increasing the user base is advantageous as it provides with more training data for SUSI.AI to learn from.

Sharing by public tweet:

Integrating to it is just the first step towards increasing SUSI.AI’s user base. Next step is to reach the users and indulge them into chatting with SUSI.AI.

Suppose a user asked something to SUSI.AI and really liked the reply from it. He/she wants to share it with his/her followers. This can prove to be a golden opportunity for us, to increase the reach of SUSI.AI. This way we can indulge their friends to try SUSI.AI and have an amazing time with it.

It becomes clear that sharing messages is an indispensable feature and can help us a lot. Twitter doesn’t provide sharing with friends through direct messages but with a feature much better than it. We can share that message as a public tweet and cover more users including the followers of the user.

 

To show this button we use Call to action support by twitter:

"message_data": {
          "text": txt,
          "ctas": [{
                      "type": "web_url",
                      "label": "Share with your followers",
                      "url": ""
          }]
}

The url key in the above code must have a value that redirects to a U.I. that allows to publicly tweet this reply by SUSI.AI.

Using this “https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=” as the url value shows a new page with an empty tweet message, as the text query in the url has no value. We set the text field with a value such that we end up like this:

and after tweeting it:

Sending a direct message link with the tweet:

Twitter provides with a lot of features when sending direct messages. Shifting a user from tweets to direct messages is beneficial in a way that we can efficiently tell the user about the capabilities of SUSI.AI and show important links to him/her like of its repository, web chat client etc.

When a user tweets to the SUSI.AI page with a query, we reply with a tweet back to the user. Along with that, we provide a link to privately message SUSI.AI account if the user wants to.

This way if user ends up visiting SUSI.AI in a chat window:

To achieve this in SUSI Tweetbot, Twitter provides with a direct message url. This url – https://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id= redirects us to the chat window of the account having that recipient id, passed as a query string. In our case the url turns out to be – https://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id=871446601000202244 as “871446601000202244” is the recipient id of @SusiAI1 account on twitter.

If we send this url as a text in our “tweet back” to the user, Twitter beautifully shows it as a clickable button with the label as “send a private message” as shown above.

Hence we call the tweet function like this:

tweetIt('@' + from + ' ' + message + date +"\nhttps://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id=871446601000202244");

Facebook:

As we all know Facebook is the giant of social networking sites. Integrating SUSI.AI to Facebook is beneficial for us.

Unlike Twitter, in Facebook we can share messages with other friends through direct messaging to them. The last topic of this blog post walks you through on adding sharing feature in SUSI FBbot:

We also take advantage from the SUSI FBbot to make SUSI.AI better. We can direct the users using SUSI messenger bots to SUSI.AI repository and show them all the required information on how to contribute to the project.

The best way to do this is by showing a “How to contribute” button when the user clicks on “Get started” in the messenger bot.

This blog post will help you showing buttons along with the replies (by SUSI.AI).

When the user clicks this button, we send two messages back to the user as shown:

This way through bots, we have somehow got the user to visit SUSI.AI repository and contribute to it or indulge him/her in the discussion, through our Gitter channel on what can be the next steps in improving SUSI.AI.

Resources:

  1. Link Ads to Messenger, Enhanced Mobile Websites, Payments and More by Seth Rosenberg from Facebook developers blog.
  2. Drive discovery of bots and other customer experiences in direct messages by  Travis Lull from Twitter blog.
Continue ReadingMaking SUSI.AI reach more users through messenger bots