Facebook messenger chatbot with Flask and pymessenger

Question

I have created a messenger chatbot with flask, pymessenger and wit.ai.

I want to add facebook provided templates (like buttons, adding images and sound media)(https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/reference/template/button/)

There using some curl and json thing which I do not understand. Can some one help me, where should I put these snippet in my python code.

    @app.route('/', methods=['POST'])

def webhook(): data = request.get_json() log(data)

if data['object'] == 'page':
    for entry in data['entry']:
        for messaging_event in entry['messaging']:

            sender_id = messaging_event['sender']['id']
            recipient_id = messaging_event['recipient']['id']

            if messaging_event.get('message'):
                if 'text' in messaging_event['message']:
                    messaging_text = messaging_event['message']['text']
                else:
                    messaging_text = 'no text'

                response = None

                entity, value = wit_response(messaging_text)

                if entity == 'newstype':
                    response = "OK. I will send you {} news".format(str(value))
                elif entity == 'cust_greet':
                    response = get_message()
                elif entity == 'cust_bye':
                    response = "Bye! Have a Good Day!".format(str(value))
                elif entity == 'cust_option':
                    response = "Option 1: Option 2:"
                bot.send_text_message(sender_id, response)


return "ok", 200

def log(message): print(message) sys.stdout.flush()

Answer 1

HTTP requests use one of these two formats:

GET: All the request information is in the url

POST: Some information is sent via a JSON format to the url

What we see in the Facebook API is a POST request: the url is defined as

https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/me/messages?access_token=<PAGE_ACCESS_TOKEN>

...and there is POST request information in the JSON section underneath

Curl is a program used to send HTTP requests from the terminal. If you install Curl, you can fill in the JSON/url information, run the command (which sends the POST request), and see the buttons pop up for the recipient. Just as you want your chatbot to do!

However, Curl is a tool, not a Python library!

To do this in Python, you can send the request through Python's built in libraries, or install a package which makes this easier (such as requests), look into "sending http requests via python".

Below is an example (adapted from this question):

    from urllib.parse import urlencode
    from urllib.request import Request, urlopen

    # the url we are sending the request to
    url = "https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/me/..."

    # the POST request data
    request_data = {
                     "recipient": {
                       "id": "<PSID>"
                     },
                     "message": {
                       "attachment": {
                           ...
                       }
                     }
                   }

    # create the request with the url and the data
    post_request = Request(url, urlencode(request_data).encode())

    # send it to Facebook! Response is the API response from Facebook
    response = urlopen(post_request).read().decode()