InnoCalendar

A Telegram Bot which provides schedule of Elective Courses Innopolis University.

Bot alias: @iellectivebot

Problem

Elective courses schedule is available now in Google Spread Sheet and the schedule changes quite often. It is hard to track changes manually. In the current situation it is required to open Google Spread Sheet every day in order to see updates - there is no notifications at all.

Summary

Addressing the above stated problem, we assume that it will be comfortable to have notifications about upcoming classes and changes in schedule. The system benefits for all masters who wants to do homework on time and be aware of schedule changes.

Prior research

For implementation we propose to use Telegram Bot. The user will be able to find and subscribe to desired elective courses, while the bot will send notifications about changes in the official Google Spreadsheet and provide information of upcoming classes.

How to run

Database

This application uses Postgres. You should have the database credentials and a database for the user.

For convinience, a docker compose file is provided to run a configured postgres database in the host network.

Set them in src/main/resources/hibernate.cfg.xml. Put the username in the <property name="hibernate.connection.username> (default is postgres) tag, put the password in the <propery name="hibernate.connection.password"> (default is postgres).

You need to create a new empty database in pgAdmin or console. Put the database connection url in the <property name="hibernate.connection.url"> tag. Additionally you can specify other connection details in the connection url. For instance, if you created the dabase with name innocalendar then the connection url should look like this: jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/innocalendar

Registering new bot

Before running the server, a telegram new bot must be registered. To this follow the instruction below.

1. Open chat with @BotFather in Telegram
2. Send commands /start and then /newbot
3. Enter the name of the bot
4. Enter the username of the bot
5. You'll recieve the message with bot info and its token. Copy that token
6. Put the token into the file Bot.java in the method getBotToken()

More info can be found here.

Building

This application can be compiled using https://github.com/apache/maven.

To compile this application, run

mvn clean compile assembly:single

After this, the JAR file will be available at target/innoelectivebot-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar.

Running

You need Java to run this application.

Run this application by executing the jar file:

java -jar target/innoelectivebot-1.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar

First run and Google Docs Application

During the first run you can be asked to provide access to the Google Docs application which is used to read the spreadsheet.

The application will print

Please open the following address in your browser:
  https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth...

To complete the OAuth2, open the provided link in a web browser and grant access to the application. After granting the access, you will be redirected to a page at localhost:8888/.... If the bot is started on the same machine where the web browser is ran, the bot will get the key itself. If, for example, the application is being deployed on the remote server, OAuth2 link can be opened on the local machine, but there should be a request sent to the bot on the remote server which can be done using curl (replace localhost:8888 with the final redirect address):

curl localhost:8888/...

Bot configuration

The Telegram ID of the admin user can be set using the ADMIN_ID constant in the Bot class (src/main/java/Bot.java).