Google smart home "sync" intent through user invocation - google-smart-home

Is it possible to have user send the sync request intent through invocation when a new device is added to the system or "requestSync" is the only way to proceed?

A user is able to trigger a sync themselves by giving the query "sync my devices".
But it's still preferred to support request sync for a more seamless user experience.

Related

Google smart home action : where to trigger a requestSync?

I created a smart home action and I have to implement the requestSync feature for certification.
But I don't understand from where to call it : from my backend fulfillment ? or from elsewhere ?.
In the documentation, I saw :
You must trigger a SYNC request:
- If the user adds a new device.
- If the user removes an existing device.
- If the user renames an existing device.
- If you implement a new device type, trait, or add a new device feature.
But all these user interactions are from the Google side (in the Google Home app), so I don't understand why Google doesn't trigger the sync itself, and how could my backend know that the user changed something ?
Can someone help me with this feature ?
Thank you !
But I don't understand from where to call it : from my backend fulfillment ? or from elsewhere ?
It definitely should come from backend.
But all these user interactions are from the Google side (in the Google Home app), so I don't understand why Google doesn't trigger the sync itself, and how could my backend know that the user changed something ?
This isn't a case to use the "requestSync". And your backend doesn't need to know about it if your users operate their devices from Google Home app
Here I will explain some example use case for you.
Imagine that you have your own application for controlling your devices. Then you develop the smarthome action project to make your device be able to controlled over voice. When your devices are linked with HomeGraph and you change your device's name, add or remove it from your own application. This is the time that your backend system should make "requestSync".
Even if your system doesn't allow user to make such of those changes on the device unless using Google Home app, google requires your system to be able to send them the "requestSync" for the case that when you "Implement a new device type, trait, or add a new device feature". This is the way that allows you(as developer) to update your users' devices without them(your users) unlinking and relinking their account.
And if you are not clear about "Implement a new device type, trait, or add a new device feature". Just thinking of case that you want to add more traits for your devices and you want to make update on all devices that has been linked before to be able to use a functionality from your new trait. You will need "rquestSync"
Hope this help. Goodluck :)

Raise an event notification to a specific client when a user is registered/created on Identity Server

I am creating an AdminUI for my users where I set all the permission. As part of the requirements, every time that a user logins on my IdentityServer I need to set some default permissions, but those are handle on my Admin application. Which is the best way to raise an event to let that application that a user was created on the IdentityServer?
The simplest is i think to create a simple WebApi in IdentityServer that returns the latest users and then let the other application poll this API every X seconds. In that way the system is cleanly decoupled. Perhaps expose the data as a a RSS XML document or a JSON list of items.
There is a built in eventing model in IdentityServer that you could use and push notifications to the Admin application. But push is a bit more complicated to get right, especially how to deal with all the failre/error cases.
I's suggest to add a custom event sink to process UserLoginSuccessEvent or any other event you need, here is list of all builtin events. Find their code here.
In the custom sink as suggested in the other answer you can call an API on admin app to inform it about changes.
Here is a sample for custom sink.
I think to keep two applications decoupled you better to setup a service-bus for simple implementation a sub/pub mechanism. when any user complete registration(or any other actions),then as mentioned in another answer handle the events and add message. admin UI should subscribed before to receive these messages with some information to create a user related data.

How to detect expired user session in a react app?

I am developing a REST API based on Node / Express and a frontend for it based on React / Redux. Users can login (which gives them access to additional functionality) but they can use basic functionality also without logging in.
When a user logs in, the client makes an HTTP call with the credentials, the server creates a session and returns a user object (user_id and some other data) as well as a session cookie. The React app saves the user object in its Redux state. In subsequent HTTP calls, the user is authenticated through the cookie.
When rendering the user interface, the React app determines whether it is logged in or not by checking for a user object in its state. This is used to grey out some buttons which are only available to logged in users, or to hide the login link when the user is already logged in.
The problem
It could occur that the session expires, or that the user logs out in a different browser tab. The React app has no way of knowing this and thinks it is still logged in (i.e. app state mismatches reality), leading to wrong UI display.
What pattern to solve this?
Put a hook on all Ajax calls to check for 401 and update the
state?
Return session state in HTTP headers (and then?)
A Comet pattern for the server to notify the client that it has been logged out? (not a REST API anymore then)
Additional calls before actual API calls to make sure user is still logged in? (seems wasteful)
And how to deal with this once the client detects it is no longer logged in during an ongoing operation? I'd prefer to handle this in one place rather than all functions making API calls...
I'd be thankful for some best practice!
There are two straightforward ways to deal with this issue in a React application that I can think of. Both inspired by a colleague of mine few days ago.
Use SSE (server-side-events) technology to PUSH notifications. As you correctly pointed out, this makes your API less pure. This approach should be quite an acceptable sacrifice where flawless UX is required AND/OR your server might need to push other notifications to the app.
Establish a short term timer somewhere in your client app (e.g.: setTimeout(...)) that makes periodic calls to a "ping" API endpoint that will return current user/session information. This approach will impact UX for the duration of timeout, often negligible, and is commonly known as polling.
Hope this helps!
As an alternative to the naive polling, you can make it a little smarter by adding an endpoint that lets you know in how many seconds timeout is set to occur for the session at that point in time.
Then ping just before that time (instead of at a certain poll-rate) and update accordingly.
Logging out in another tab would return with an invalid token so would be picked up, too, but not as quickly if this is your main concern.
For this you could use broadcasting to let the other tabs know immediately (or use sessionStorage's change event to simulate a broadcast on unsupported browsers).
Otherwise the best way would be to implement a ServiceWorker; these can handle all requests for your app to the server. It's a centralised piece of code separate from your app that can broadcast to all tabs that a session is lost the moment it sees that one of its requests was rejected, and you can efficiently naively poll from this one place (instead of in each individual tab's runtime).
Since I am using token from the API Server that is valid for a specific period of time. So in addition to setting token in session storage I was thinking of setting up another session storage variable that stores the timestamp at which the token was generated. Then, in my js code I plan to add the validity period (say, 3600 seconds) and check if the token is still valid or not. If it is valid then the user session is valid else it is invalid.

How long does IBM's Watson Dialog Service retain conversation and client details?

I'm just getting started with Watson Dialog service and I'm trying to ensure that I don't allow my users to attempt to resume a conversation with the bot if their conversation session is no longer valid. Is there an expiration on Dialog conversations at all? Or does IBM simply store conversations forever?
EDIT:
If there is a method to determine whether a Dialog Conversation has expired, please provide a link to documentation, or an example, of said method.
If a user returns and starts a new session, then that is a new conversation. Conversations do time out. I've only worked on enterprise engagements, so the time out varies. I believe default is 30 minutes, but that may change for Bluemix.
A better solution however is to have your application on determining it's time out, to dump the users profile variables to storage. When they return you can rebuild the relevant part of the conversation.

detect and perform action when user logs out of GAE app

I need my (python) google app to perform an action (submit a form) if the user logs out. This is simple enough to do if they use the logout links in my app, but if they log out from a gmail page or something, I don't know how to handle it.
Another possible source of error would be if the user closed the browser window, shut down their computer, etc. resulting in a log-off. Is this scenario is equivalent to what I describe in the previous paragraph, or are they different somehow?
To expand this question since it seems the above is not at all trivial: if I set a cleanup function on a timeout, will the python session in fact continue to run in the GAE cloud after the cookie expires, and actually execute the timeout function?
Close browser window and shut down computer result log out because of session expired (cookie). It is slightly different from user click log out manually.
In both case, I don't think GAE can track these behaviors.
The best thing that I can think about is to develop a browser extension.
Or just don't design the service based on detecting user's log out.

Resources