I currently try to build an alexa skill providing users with news information out of a DB.
I have 3 news topics in that DB:
- local
- global
- finance
So what I do currently is that if the user invoces the NewsIntent I collect all the data of all 3 topics, merge them together and provide that data as output via Alexa.
My question now is how would I integrate the NextIntent.
E.g. the user is not interested in the local news and would like to skip it.
My problem is, when an intent gets invoced teh I build up the response and return it back to Alexa. But in that case I would need to be able to send 3 responsed one after the other, right?
I do not know if my thoughts on that are correct or not.
If you have any idea please let me know.
Thank you!
You can use Alexa Session Attributes https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/custom-skills/manage-skill-session-and-session-attributes.html to store in which DB are you currently. Like db: local. Then when you receive AMAZON.NextIntent you will check session attributes and based on them you will use expected database.
Related
I'm creating my first application that requires me to update the app based on user input. I've been searching for the best way to send input to me. For example, I have a button that when the user presses I would like to send me the information they've added to a text field. Being new to this, I thought this could be done by simply sending the information to a specified email, but from what I've researched I will need some sort of database. Looking through the Apple Developer Documentation I don't even know which topic I should be looking at to figure this out, any help or direction would be very helpful!
You need to setup a server (using an API) to receive the information.
Usually you will use a webservice to receive the info from the app, although there are other ways to do that.
Sending an email through iOs would require the user to accept the email that is being sent, so doesn't look like a good idea.
Take a look at some options available to create webservices (django rest framework or flask), Google's Firebase also can be handy in this situation, since is only integrating it with your app and storing the data you want to store, with easy integration for Authentication and user tracking.
Since Parse is shutting down, we are currently using Firebase to support basic data storage and real-time messaging. However, in order to implement a key feature in our app, we need to run some code on a server. The following is what we are trying to accomplish:
We allow users to upload key words to Firebase, then we want to send notifications to them if any new posts that contain these key words were uploaded by other users. For example, userA wants to know if anyone posted information related to chemistry, so userA enters key words "chemistry" and "science" in our app which get stored in Firebase, userB posted an article called "chemistry rocks!" which contains the key word "chemistry", userA will then receive a notification immediately about this post.
We have a couple of solutions in mind, but we are not sure which way to go and how to properly implement these solutions.
1 - Build a server that listens to Firebase changes and also supports sending notifications to individual users. However, to host and maintain a server just to run a search algorithm is just too much work for this simple task.
2 - Store the key words in another database that somehow can send notifications according to the search result. This would be faster because we wouldn't have to connect Firebase server to our own server, but again we would still have to host and maintain a separate server.
I have looked into Google App Engine, their push/pull queue feature sounds like something we want, but does GAE support notifications? And also how can we hook it up with Firebase? We also came across Firebase+Batch to send notifications, but I don't think Batch supports cloud computation.
Has anyone run into this problem? Any solutions?
We now have one site running but we will need to build a branded site for our client soon. The client site will have exactly the same data set as our current site expect for the user data. The client site must have totally separated user info which allows only the client to use the site.
I don't see the need for setting up a new database or creating a new user table for the client. My tentative solution is add a "Company" column for the user table so that I can differ which site the user data row is on.
I do not know if this approach will work or not or if it is the best practice. Could anyone with experience like this shed some light on this question?
Thanks,
Nigong
P.S. I use LAMP with AWS.
Using an extra column to store a company / entity id is a common approach for multitenant system. In general you will want to abstract the part that that verifies you can only retrieve data you're allowed to a piece that all queries go through, like your ORM. This will prevent people new to the project from exposing/using data that shouldn't be exposed/used.
I have a cakePHP community. User are able to signup and login. I like to create a survey using SurveyMonkey.
Therefor I create the survey and make it available to my members using the direct URL. In my member database I have to save the information "did completed the survey = yes/no".
Is there any way to identify the user filling in the survey and write this information into the database?
SurveyMonkey has an API https://developer.surveymonkey.com/ , that let you collect info from your survey (completedf or not).
This is the only way i think, (if it s not include in your website).
I know that you can simply do this with Examinare Survey Tool. What you do first is that you use the API inside Examinare to add a recipient for all the users in the survey base.
Use the PHP Wrapper library in their developer site.
Loop it through and use the https://developer.examinare.com/php-wrapper-library/ and use the example code.
If you let people register with same email more than 1 time then save the ContactID into your database on the recipient.
Then to not create an email invite you use this : markrecipientstosurvey
The surveyID is available inside the Examinare account.
When you done this script part then make it as a cronjob for instance inside the crontab -e
I would run it every 30 minutes or 1 per hour.
Next part you create a page for the survey redirect where you use the function: listsurveysbyuser
to get the survey version and url
(there is a special link for the mobile user that even works for the normal mobile phone NOT only smartphones)
Now you just redirect them to the survey. If you want them to return to your site after then you use the redirect_url parameter that is added to the url or use the redirect inside your account. Ask support about that if you need :) They are fast... Never had to wait more than a couple of minutes.
When the person return then just check if they are marked as complete with the same api call: listsurveysbyuser
Looks much but it is very easy to implement and if you have any problems then just ask the support at support#examinare.com I have asked alot and never had them to say that it can not be done. Really nice!
EDIT:
I see that they just released a tutorial much better than my example:
https://developer.examinare.com/how-to-use-surveys-in-cakephp-with-very-little-development/
One option:
Use unique Custom Variables in the URL that is visited by each member of the community
For example, https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/your_survey?userid=$my_user_id
Note that you can create weblink or email collectors with the API (endpoints: create_flow or create_collector).
Then track the responses using the get_respondent_list or get_responses endpoints of the API.
Note: Please confirm with the Survey Monkey API team that the custom variables can be read via the API.
Another option:
Use the email collector (create_flow) API endpoint and send it to your members' email addresses.
I want to create an online quiz website using Silverlight.
When the registered users are logged in, they can view and answer the quiz once per page.
To proceed to the next question, they must push next button, and the new data downloaded from the server.
The previous questions are not cached. Thereby everytime the question is requested, the question will be reloaded from the server again.
My question is how to do my scenario above in silverlight?
Thank you in advance.
Now that your intent is clear, you want to prevent discovery of the content in your assembly. The answer is you can't really protect your assembly. In order to run it the client needs to fetch it, if it can be fetched then the would be hacker can get it, trying to limit caching isn't really a prevention.
However the solution is to not put senstive stuff in your assembly to start with. Place code server side to do the sensitive stuff and access that code via a service interface such as WCF or Web services or even plain old XML in XML out posting.
You could use IsolatedStorage to store some state related info (and you can even encrypt it before you save if you want - it's your storage, do what you want with it). Another way to store state information is to use cookies, here and here.
The "state" information that i refer to is the state and/or progress of your Silverlight app, i.e. you can track where the user got to in the questions, and avoid requesting questions they have already completed. Both of these types of storage can be deleted by the end user, if they know what they are doing. But you shouldn't let that worry you - if they want to cheat, then let them.
Create the silverlight app to request the questions via a Web Service. As long as you're using a proper web service and not faking it in some way. The browser is not going to cache the webservice response.