Bot settings

Set environment variables from Web interface that can be read from your bot datastore

Meya reserves a special key _settings in your bot scope database to store settings from the Meya Web IDE.

Use-cases

  • store API keys and urls
  • differentiate development from production environments
  • store global UX variables like default delay timings
  • credentials to access restricted resources
  • reuse bot code in multiple bots, adapted with settings
  • have non-technical roles adjust basic bot settings w/o touching code

Writing settings

You can find the settings from Dashboard > Bot > Settings. You can can specify any data using YAML syntax: strings, integers, floats, booleans, lists and objects.

1036

What the settings editor looks like

Reading settings

You can read from settings in BFML using mustache syntax {{ bot._settings.key }} or from Python components using self.db.bot.settings["key"]

📘

See lines 6, 8 in BFML below.

states:
    timezone:
        component: meya.text
        properties:
            text: "Your bot is configured in the {{ bot._settings.timezone }}"
        delay:
            relative: "{{ bot._settings.short_delay }}"
    register:
        component: register
        properties:
            data:
                age: 53
                name: "Michelle Obama"
    done:
        component: meya.text
        properties:
            text: "That was cool. 😎"

📘

See lines 11, 12 in the following Python component.

from meya import Component
import requests
from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth


class Register(Component):
    """Register some data with API"""

    def start(self):
        # read url and api key from bot settings
        api_url = self.db.bot.settings["api_url"]
        api_key = self.db.bot.settings["api_key"]

        auth = HTTPBasicAuth(api_key, "")

        # read data from properties
        data = self.properties.get('data') or {}
        
        # make the request
        print requests.post(api_url, json=data, auth=auth).json()

        # output confirmation
        message = self.create_message(text="Done.")
        return self.respond(message=message, action="next")
716

Output from this example.