I am working on a small project trying to control some steps of a workflow in a web application using MS teams. My idea is to use R as an intermediate step between the application (which has a number of API endpoints I can call from R) and Microsoft Teams chats (or channels). Users would then use a set of keywords in the chat to lead to an action in the application. For example they might use "publish ABC-123" in a specific chat and this would lead to the application publishing document ABC-123 somewhere via R which would orchestrate everything.
I have a couple of ideas but there are drawbacks:
I thought originally about using microsoft365r. We have an app registered in Microsoft 365 which would allow us to monitor a specific chat for messages that trigger actions in R. The problem with this approach is that we would need to have the R code running and checking MS Teams every couple of minutes. It is certainly doable, but not very elegant.
Another option could be setting up a plumber API and an outgoing webhook in MS Teams. This seems like the ideal way to do it, but webhooks in MS Teams require https and as far as I understand this is not straightforward to implement in plumber.
I would appreciate any ideas on how to do this. I know I am not very specific, but mostly looking for high level pointers of what I could look at. Many thanks!
You actually have a bunch of options for this:
Create a bot directly in code, e.g. per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/bots/what-are-bots . There's a bit of a learning curve of course, and it depends on whether you have development skills outside of r, e.g. python, .net, whatever. The bot would then call your code as needed.
Create a no-code bot using Power Virtual Agents. This is the equivalent, for bots, of Power Apps or Power Automate, if you're familiar with those.
Create a workflow, either in Power Automate or Azure Logic Apps, that can listen for and respond to messages. This is kind of similar to a bot, but with finer scope (and therefore less capability). If you want it to call out to your app, e.g. to an endpoint, you'd need a Premium Connecter for Power Automate, or you can use an Azure Logic App directly (uses the same engine, but the pricing model is different for these and Power Automate is a little easier to work with.
Outgoing webhook - you can implement these as standalone, but actually from your use case it sounds like a bot would be better anyway, and it's kind of what you need to build to make this kind of webhook work properly anyway.
Related
What costs are involved with developing and/or releasing a Google Assistant App?
eg: Can you develop an app using DialogFlow and a backend (say Firebase) without having to pay while you learn?
First of all - you don't need to use Dialogflow or Firebase to develop your action. Both are suggested, but neither are required. You can use any NLP you want, or none at all if you use the Actions SDK (but you want an NLP). You can use any backend at all, including running it off your local machine and tunneling to it via ngrok, but you don't want to do that for production.
But, during development (and even during a light deployment before your action becomes massively popular and a stand-out hit), you have lots of solutions that will be free.
Dialogflow is free for use with the Google Assistant. Period. There is an Enterprise edition which offers additional services and support for a cost, but you won't need them. There are restrictions, but you won't bump into them until you hit 3 requests per second - which you shouldn't during development.
Firebase's free tier (the Spark Plan) is good for very simple experimentation, but once you start doing network calls to outside Google's network (if you are trying to call the network API for other services), you will be blocked. No worries! The "Blaze Plan" paid tier does require a way to bill you, but they don't start billing you until you get quite a bit of usage: 2 million function calls / month and similarly scaled usage of CPU, memory, and network. So even the "Blaze Plan" will be free during development (and for basic usage).
Updated, December 2020
Things have changed a bit since the original answer was posted, but the underlying basics remain true - there is no charge to develop for Actions on Google.
Dialogflow now has an "Essentials" edition and a more advanced "CX" edition. While you can still use both to build Actions, they're not really intended for this purpose anymore.
Instead, Google has included the Actions Builder into the Actions Console to handle the NLP work. The Actions SDK works with this, but can also just pass along all the STT information to your webhook. Both are also free to use.
Dialogflow is for free if you don't use it as an enterprise:
https://dialogflow.com/pricing/
And Firebase free tier should be enough if you not using firebase
already for other projects. enter link description here
But of course you have to calculate your own time so in case of the
spent time probably not.
For everything else yes it is, as long as you not using it already somewhere. You can for development also host your server local and use an ngrok tunnel as sever address for Dialogflow.
As an addition to shortQuestion's answer:
The free plan in Firebase should be enough if you're just using it for learning and developing apps for personal use. If you want to go a bit further you'll need to upgrade the plan.
You can sign up with a free trial for actions on Google to get 300$ of credits during a 12 month period which would be more than enough to do anything you want.
The costs of Firebase/Actions on Google on a higher plan aren't anything to worry about though, you'd be talking about a few cent per multiple hundred thousand requests.
I'm starting to learn about google's firebase, seems really cool for real time applications. The auto-synced database seems very easy to use and I feel like diving into it.. I plan to start learning by building a simple checkers multiplayer game, but I still have an important question about it..
Firebase auto-syncs between users and devices using their 'magic' Database, which stores data and sends out to 'subscribers' of that db. Now what if I want to have some server processing of this data in between? For example, when a player makes a move, I want something that is not on client-side to make sure that is a valid move.. what would be the architecture to accomplish that?
Having a trusted process that sits between the users is a common scenario when using Firebase. Have a look at our classic blog post Where does Firebase fit in your app?, it would fit closest to pattern 2 there.
Typically you'll want to use the firebase-queue for this. Your users write their "requests" (probably moves in your case) into the queue, the server processes those and updates the actual board.
Another great thing about this is that it's easy to secure. The users can only write to the queue, while the server is the only one that can read the queue and update the board. A lot simpler to capture in security rules than many other approaches.
I have recently began working with multiplayer games in Unity. I am not using Photon Unity Networking but rather the built in networking inside Unity.
In the game I am trying to create, each player has their own money, and inventory variables. My original plan was to store these variable client-side, but I realized this was a bad idea.
What would be the best way to store these variable like money and inventory on the server? I tried making a "Player" class on the server, and created an instance of the class for every player that connected. However, after days of research and experiments, I was unable to find a way to do so successfully.
I'm sure this is a common concept for multiplayer games. So I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction on how to do so.
The way we choose to do it, was to create a very basic webservice (REST) which the server (and the server only) could talk to.
The webservice was written in Perl with MongoDB as storage backend, but the options here are almost endless, so use whatever you think is best for you.
I have been given access to a real time data feed which provides location information, and I would like to build a website around this, but I am a little unsure on what architecture to use to achieve my needs.
Unfortunately the feed I have access to will only allow a single connection per IP address, therefore building a website that talks directly to the feed is out - as each user would generate a new request, which would be rejected. It would also be desirable to perform some pre-processing on the data, so I guess I will need some kind of back end which retrieves the data, processes it, then makes it available to a website.
From a front end connection perspective, web services sounds like it may work, but would this also create multiple connections to the feed for each user? I would also like the back end connection to be persistent, so that data is retrieved and processed even when the site is not being visited, I believe IIS will recycle web services and websites when they are idle?
I would like to keep the design fairly flexible - in future I will be adding some mobile clients, so the API needs to support remote connections.
The simple solution would have been to log all the processed data to a database, which could then be picked up by the website, but this loses the real-time aspect of the data. Ideally I would be looking to push the data to the website every time the data changes or now data is received.
What is the best way of achieving this, and what technologies are there out there that may assist here? Comet architecture sounds close to what I need, but that would require building a back end that can handle multiple web based queries at once, which seems like quite a task.
Ideally I would be looking for a C# / ASP.NET based solution with Javascript client side, although I guess this question is more based on architecture and concepts than technological implementations of these.
Thanks in advance for all advice!
Realtime Data Consumer
The simplest solution would seem to be having one component that is dedicated to reading the realtime feed. It could then publish the received data on to a queue (or multiple queues) for consumption by other components within your architecture.
This component (A) would be a standalone process, maybe a service.
Queue consumers
The queue(s) can be read by:
a component (B) dedicated to persisting data for future retrieval or querying. If the amount of data is large you could add more components that read from the persistence queue.
a component (C) that publishes the data directly to any connected subscribers. It could also do some processing, but if you are looking at doing large amounts of processing you may need multiple components that perform this task.
Realtime web technology components (D)
If you are using a .NET stack then it seems like SignalR is getting the most traction. You could also look at XSockets (there are more options in my realtime web tech guide. Just search for '.NET'.
You'll want to use signalR to manage subscriptions and then to publish messages to registered client (PubSub - this SO post seems relevant, maybe you can ask for a bit more info).
You could also look at offloading the PubSub component to a hosted service such as Pusher, who I work for. This will handle managing subscriptions and component C would just need to publish data to an appropriate channel. There are other options all listed in the realtime web tech guide.
All these components come with a JavaScript library.
Summary
Components:
A - .NET service - that publishes info to queue(s)
Queues - MSMQ, NServiceBus etc.
B - Could also be a simple .NET service that reads a queue.
C - this really depends on D since some realtime web technologies will be able to directly integrate. But it could also just be a simple .NET service that reads a queue.
D - Realtime web technology that offers a simple way of routing information to subscribers (PubSub).
If you provide any more info I'll update my answer.
A good solution to this would be something like http://rubyeventmachine.com/ or http://nodejs.org/ . It's not asp.net, but it can easily solve the issue of distributing real time data to other users. Since user connections, subscriptions and broadcasting to channels are built in to each, that will make coding the rest super simple. Your clients would just connect over standard tcp.
If you needed clients to poll for updates then you would need a que system to store info for the next request. That could be a simple array, or a more complicated que system depending on your requirements and number of users.
There may be solutions for .net that I am not aware of that do the same thing, but those are the 2 I know of.
We have a rather large document routing framework that's currently implemented in SharePoint (with a large set of cumbersome SP workflows), and it's running into the edge of what SP can do easily. It's slated for a rewrite into .NET
I've spent the past week or so reading and watching WF4 discussions and demonstrations to get an idea of WF4, because I think it's the right solution. I'm having difficulty envisioning how the system will be configured, though, so I need guidance on a few points from people with experience:
Let's say I have an approval that has to be made on a document. When the wf starts, it'll decide who should approve, and send that person an email notification. Inside the notification, the user would have an option to load an ASP.NET page to approve or reject. The workflow would then have to be resumed from the send email step. If I'm planning on running this as a WCF WF Service, how do I get back into the correct instance of the paused service? (considering I've configured AppFabric and persistence) I somewhat understand the idea of a correlation handle, but don't think it's meant for this case.
Logging and auditing will be key for this system. I see the AppFabric makes event logs of this data, but I haven't cracked the underlying database--is it simple to use for reporting, or should I create custom logging activities to put around my actions? From experience, which would you suggest?
Thanks for any guidance you can provide. I'm happy to give further examples if necessary.
To send messages to a specific workflow instance you need to set up message correlation between your different Receive activities. In order to do that you need some unique value as part of your message data.
The Appfabric logging works well but if you want to create custom a custom logging solution you don't need to add activities to your workflow. Instead you create a custom TrackingParticipant to do the work for you. How you store the data is then up to you.
Your scenario is very similar to the one I used for the Introduction to Workflow Services Hands On Lab in the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit. I suggest you take a look at the hands on lab or the Windows Server AppFabric / Workflow Services Demo - Contoso HR sample code.