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Plugin Contentful

For more information, refer to GitHub.

What Does This Plugin Do?​

Botonic Plugin Contentful is one of the available plugins for Botonic. Contentful is a CMS (Content Management System) which manages contents of a great variety of types, such as text, dates, numerics, images... These simple contents can be combined into custom complex contents (eg. a carousel or a message box) which can be queried over APIs.

Features​

  • Web dashboard for defining complex contents and validation rules for their values
  • Web dashboard for creating, navigating and querying the custom contents
  • Multilanguage content values
  • Content values history revision
  • Role management
  • Migration and backup tools

Advantages​

  • The contents and navigation of static menus, images and texts can be easily defined from a user-friendly UI.
  • Benefiting from of a best in breed CMS solution.
  • Updating the bot contents does not require redeploying the bot.
  • Users will need to download a much lighter bundle to start using the bot.

Currently the Contentful plugin allows your bot to easily access this kind of contents:

  • Combinations of the following Botonic UI components: Start up messages, Carousels and Texts. Their buttons can be configured to trigger other botonic components as well as opening external URLs.
  • Images, which optionally can be assigned to different assets depending on the user language.
  • Information about Botonic desk queues, such as its name and schedule.

For the previous content, the dashboard allows assigning a list of tags to your contents, so that your bot can query them by a given tag value.

  • Schedules with configurable timing per week day, as well as exception for bank holidays or sales periods.
  • Any kind of files uploaded to your Contentful account.

Setup​

Create a Contentful Account​

  1. Create an account at www.contentful.com and select Create an empty space.
  2. Go to the General Settings page and write down the space ID number.
  3. Create a Delivery API token and safely store its value (it grants read access to your account).
  4. Create a Content Management token and click on Generate personal token to safely store its value (it grants write access to your account).

Install the Plugin​

  1. Install the plugin in your bot's project by running :
npm install @botonic/plugin-contentful
  1. Install the contentful-cli
npm install -g contentful-cli

  1. Execute the following command to create content models required by the plugin. Replace YOUR_ID and YOUR_TOKEN with the space id and contentful delivery token that you obtained in the previous section. You can find the export files in the package exports directory
contentful space import --space-id={SPACE_ID} --management-token={TOKEN} --content-file {EXPORT_FILE}.json

Note you will need to ensure your contentful locales are changed from en-US to en

Use​

Define Your Contents​

Publishing Contents​

  1. Go to the Contentful dashboard.
  2. Open the "Contents section" and create the contents required by your bot.

Remember that they will not be available until you press the "publish" button and the button becomes green.

Buttons​

The content buttons may trigger different behaviours depending on the type of its target field:

  • If you assign a StartUp, Text or Carousel, the button text will be automatically assigned to the Short Text field of the target content. When the button is pressed, it will send your bot a payload with value "\<MODELTYPE>\$\<ID>". \<MODEL_TYPE> may be _startUp, text or carousel , whereas \<ID> will be the ID of the target.
  • If you assign a URL, the browser will open it when the button is pressed.
  • In two cases you should assign a Button target. 1) When you want the button to have a text different than the target content's Short Text. 2) When you want to assign a custom Payload to trigger a bot action.
  1. either create a new entry.
  2. or link an existing one (which may be shared by other buttons).

In the case of Text's, you can also define Follow Up contents. This feature is used to automatically display a second message after a timeout. This can be used to ask the user to rate the bot, to display again the main carousel...

Internationalization​

To internationalize your bot, first define the list of required languages at the Settings|Locales menu of you Contentful space. It's recommended to define fallback locales, in case that any content lacks the translation text for some reason. From the content edit page, click on "Change" at the translation section to enable the required languages.

You will see now that you can assign multiple values for the fields that can be internationalized (as defined at your content model).

The value of referenced contents (eg. a list of Button's) are not defined for a given locale, the plugin will deliver them as defined for the locale's fallback locale. In that case, the referenced contents will be delivered in the same locale as the referring content.

Markdown Support​

While entering data through the Contentful dashboard visual editor, the user automatically generates markdown text.

The Contentful plugin provides functions to parse and transform the markdown formatting if further customization needs to be processed by the bot.

The plugin also provides a library to convert the markdown text into WhatsApp's specific markup format, the latter only supporting bold and italic formatting at the moment.

Program Your Bot​

Add the following to you bot's plugins.js file:

export const plugins = [
  ...
  {
    id: 'contentful',
    resolve: require('@botonic/plugin-contentful'),
    options: {
      spaceId: YOUR_CONTENTFUL_SPACEID,
      accessToken: DELIVERY_API_TOKEN,
    },
  },
  ...
]

Rendering a Contentful Content With Botonic React​

To render a botonic StartUp, Texts and Carousels with the contents configured at contentful space:

  1. Create the following functions, which convert the result from the Contentful plugin to react components (They are not implemented within the Contentful plugin to keep the plugin fully decoupled from React). Note that the code shown below contains TypeScript annotations.
import * as cms from '@botonic/plugin-contentful'
import { msgsToBotonic } from '@botonic/react'

const converter = new cms.BotonicMsgConverter()

export function renderText(text) {
  const msg = converter.text(text)
  return msgsToBotonic(msg)
}

export function renderCarousel(carousel) {
  const msg = converter.carousel(carousel)
  return msgsToBotonic(msg)
}

export function renderStartUp(startUp: cms.StartUp): React.ReactNode {
  const msg = converter.startUp(startUp)
  return msgsToBotonic(msg)
}
  1. Render it from your actions. To obtain \<YOUR TEXT CONTENT ID>, open the content at www.contentful.com and click the "Info" button on the top right corner and copy the "ENTRY ID" value.
import * as cms from '@botonic/plugin-contentful';
import * as React from 'react';
import { renderText } from './render'; // the file created on previous step

export default class Text extends React.Component {
  static displayName = 'Text';

  static async botonicInit(init) {
    const plugin: cms.default = init.plugins.contentful;

    let text = await plugin.cms.text(<YOUR TEXT CONTENT ID>);
    return { text };
  }

  render() {
    return renderText(this.props['text']);
  }
}

plugin.cms.text(id) returns an object with all the fields configured at www.contentful.com. Instead of directly passing it to the renderText function, you can also process them according to your requirements (eg. you could be just interested on the text field).

  1. To render the content assigned to the buttons at the Contentful dashboard, you'll need to assign these routes:
import * as cms from '@botonic/plugin-contentful';
....

 {
    payload: cms.ContentCallback.regexForModel(cms.TopContentType.TEXT),
    action: Text
  },
  {
    payload: cms.ContentCallback.regexForModel(cms.TopContentType.CAROUSEL),
    action: Carousel
  },
  1. And define an action for each route like this:
export default class Text extends React.Component {

  static async botonicInit(init: ActionInitInput) {
    const plugin: cms.default = init.plugins.contentful;

    const callback = cms.ContentCallback.ofPayload(init.input.payload);
    let text = await botoplugin.cms.text(callback.id);
    return { text };
  }

   render() {
    return renderText(this.props['text']);
  }

Deploy​

Reduce bundle size​

To reduce the size of the bots using this plugin, you can use one of the techniques described in this article, such as using the plugins moment-locales-webpack-plugin and moment-timezone-data-webpack-plugin.

Design​

See diagram. Exported from https://www.draw.io/#G1fMaHqDYF-DsGWC6JrCWvo6f7Psx7Vpzw

Content Management​

Export​

Install cli:

npm install -g contentful-cli

Generate personal token from https://app.contentful.com/spaces/p2iyhzd1u4a7/api/cma_tokens and run

contentful space export --space-id=p2iyhzd1u4a7 --management-token=xxx --download-assets

Search by Keywords​

Apart from fetching your contents by ID, you can also search them. From www.contentful.com, you can assign keywords to your contents of type StartUp, Text, Carousel, URL and Queue. Each keyword is a string of words that can be used to search your contents. To make the search more flexible, the plugin will perform the following preprocessing in both the content keywords and the search keywords:

  • Conversion to lowercase.
  • Removal of spaces and other separators (eg. commas).
  • Stemming to remove suffixes without semantics.
  • Removal of stop words (eg. "the", "and",...)
import * as cms from '@botonic/plugin-contentful';

  static async botonicInit(init: ActionInitInput) {
    const plugin: cms.default = init.plugins.contentful;
    let results = await plugin.search.searchByKeywords(
        "text to search",
        cms.MatchType.ONLY_KEYWORDS_FOUND,
        { locale: 'es' }
      )
    for (let result of results) {
        console.log(result);
     }
  }

Keyword Edition in contenful.com

Be careful when editing the keywords in contenful.com. If you select "Tag" as the Appearance configuration for your keywords, remember to always press RETURN after typing a new keyword. Otherwise, it will be ignored.

Types of Search searchByKeywords allows 3 different match types, all of them performing the previously specified preprocessing:

  • ONLY_KEYWORDS_FOUND: the content must have a keyword with only the words from the search text.
  • KEYWORDS_AND_OTHERS_FOUND: The keyword may be preceded and followed by other words in the search text.
  • ALL_WORDS_IN_KEYWORDS_MIXED_UP: All the words in the keyword must appear on the search text, even if mixed up with other words in any order.

Schedule The plugin allows you to use the Customer Support queues in a more flexible way.

Schedule Exceptions To define exceptions to the general weekly schedule, create a Day Schedule at the Exceptions section. For these days, the corresponding weekday schedule will be ignored.

Empty day To define an empty day (such as bank holidays), just create the Day Schedule but don't specify any Hour range.

Exceptional Schedule For days with exceptional schedule (such as sales days), create the Day Schedule and specify the special Hour range.

Extending this plugin

How to add a new TopContent​

  • Don't panic. You can take this as an example
  • Add enum entry to NonMessageTopContentType or MessageTopContentType
  • Implement a content class derived from TopContents to contents.ts
  • Add the new model to QA contentful space. To test custom fields, add a string field named "customFieldText"
  • Implement a delivery function to CMS interface
  • Implement a class derived from TopContentDelivery in src/contentful/contents
  • Integrate the previous class in ManageContentful as done for other types
  • Implement a delivery function to all classes that implement CMS interface
  • Implement a \<NewContent>Builder class derived from TopContentBuilder in src/cms/factories/content-factories.ts. Implement a Rnd\<NewContent>Builder class derived from \<NewContent>Builder at src/cms/test-helpers/builders.ts
  • Write integration tests using the builder classes in tests/contentful/contents which validates delivery of:
    1. Minimal content (all content's optional fields in blank)
    2. Full content. All content's optional fields filled. For complex contents, you may need different tests for each subcase.
    3. In contentful.com, add to the new model a text field named customFieldText. Fill the customFields on one of the tests contents. Write a test which validates that when delivered, the content common.customFields field only contains the field "customFieldText"
  • Add new field types to CONTENT_FIELDS in manage-cms/fields.ts