google_sheet_reader_bot

Telegram bot to get data from Google Sheet, checks the very first column for time (in hours) and returns rows where time matches

steps to use

1. Create Google Sheet with the data. The very first column is treated as a key for the start time of event. You may have multiple rows with the same key, all of them they will be displayed then.

2. Publish this Google sheet (File - Publish To Web - OK)

3. (for heroku) Create a new app on heroku (say, "myapp-bot-app")

3. (for cloud9) Create account on c9.io, create Node.js workspace and run the command git clone [email protected]:emirn/google_sheet_reader_bot.git

4. Register telegram bot (send /newbot commmand to register bot with https://telegram.me/BotFather in Telegram) and copy token for newly created bot.

5. Copy config.js.example into config.js

6. Fill values in config.js to set:

module.exports = {
 'TelegramProductionURL': 'https://myapp-bot-app.herokuapp.com/', // your heroku app do not forget trailing "/" !!
 'TelegramToken': '<telegram token here>', // Telegram token you got from @BotFather
 'googleSheetKey': '<google sheet key>', // the key of the google sheet (should be public!), extract key from the google sheet doc publich url
 "confTimeZone": "Europe/Berlin" // time zone of the conference so the bot could output events for the current time in the form like "Europe/Berlin", see http://momentjs.com/timezone/
}

7. Install required packages using npm install command in the console

8 (for heroku). Push the code to heroku using commands git add ., git commit -m "initial version" and then finally git push

9 (for cloud9). Simply run the bot on the workspace using the command node .. IMPORTANT: cloud9 is mostly for development purposes, if you want to run the bot as product then consider running on Heroku too.

Congrats! Now you may send the command like 10 to the bot and it will send you all events which are taking place at 10 o'clock according to the spreadsheet.

You may change the spreadsheet and the bot will take new data form the spreadheet online.

How it works for enduser:

• add the bot to the Telegram using the link https://telegram.me/yourbot where yourbot will be replaced with your actual bot name
• send 'Hi' to the bot to show events taking place at the current time (in the timeone defined by config.confTimeZone)
• or send the time in a form of 12 for 12 PM, 14:43 for 2.43 PM etc.
• the bot will list all events taking place at time entered