[Advanced] Backend development

A backend is the glue code to connect Errbot to a chatting service. Starting with Errbot 2.3.0, backends can be developed out of the main repository. This documentation is there to guide you making a new backend for a chatting service but is also interesting to understand more core concepts of Errbot.

It is important to understand the core concepts of Errbot before starting to work on a backend.

Architecture

Backends are just a specialization of the bot, they are what is instanciated as the bot and are the entry point of the bot.

Following this logic a backend must inherit from ErrBot.

ErrBot inherits itself from Backend. This is where you can find what Errbot is expecting from backend.

You’ll see a series of methods simply throwing the exception NotImplementedError. Those are the one you need to implement to fill up the blanks.

Identifiers

Every backend have a very specific way of addressing who, where and how to speak to somebody.

Lifecycle: identifiers are either created internally by the backend or externally by the plugins from build_identifier().

There are 2 types of identifiers:

  • a person
  • a person in a chatroom

Identifier for a person

It is important to note that for some backends you can infer what a person is from what a person in a chatroom is, but for privacy reason you cannot on some backends ie. you can send a private message to a person in a chatroom but if the person leaves the room you have no way of knowing how to contact her/him personally.

Backends must implement a specific Identifier class that matches their way of identifying those.

For example Slack has a notion of userid and channeid you can find in the SlackIdentifier which is completely opaque to ErrBot itself.

But you need to implement a mapping from those private parameters to those properties:

  • person: this needs to be a string that identifies a person. This should be enough info for the backend to contact this person. This should be a secure and sure way to identify somebody.
  • client: this will identify optionally as a string additional information or channel from where this person is sending a message. For example, some backends open a one to one room to chat, or some backends identifies the current peripheral from which the person is sending a message from (mobile, web, …)

Some of those strings are completely unreadable for humans ie. U00234FBE for a person. So you need to provide more human readable info:

  • nick: this would be the short name refering to that person. ie. gbin
  • displayName: (optionally) this would give for example a full name ie. Guillaume Binet. This is often found in professional chatting services.

Identifier for a person in a chatroom

This is simply an Identifier with an added property: room. The string representation of room should give a chatroom identifier (see below).

See for example SlackMUCIdentifier

Chatrooms / MUCRooms

In order to implement the various MUC related APIs you’ll find from Backend, you’ll need to implement a Room class. To help guide you, you can inherit from MUCRoom and fill up the blanks from the NotImplementedError.

Lifecycle: Those are created either internally by the backend or externally through join_room() from a string identifier.