Advanced

This will be more of a FAQ on some important notes before you embark on your next big bot project!

Default Abilities

It is possible to declare "DEFAULT" abilities that process non-command messages. This is quite close to a reply. If a user says "Hey there" and the default ability is implemented, it will process this input.

 /**
   * This ability has an extra "flag". It needs a photo to activate! This feature is activated by default if there is no /command given.
   */
  public Ability sayNiceToPhoto() {
    return Ability.builder()
        .name(DEFAULT) // DEFAULT ability is executed if user did not specify a command -> Bot needs to have access to messages (check FatherBot)
        .flag(PHOTO)
        .privacy(PUBLIC)
        .locality(ALL)
        .input(0)
        .action(ctx -> silent.send("Daaaaang, what a nice photo!", ctx.chatId()))
        .build();
  }

This ability will send a "Daaaaang, what a nice photo!" whenever the bot receives a photo. This is one use case where replies and abilities are interchangeable.

The Global Flag

There is a global flag in AbilityBot that restricts the kind of "updates" it can process. The default implementation is passthrough - it allows all updates to be processed. As an example, if you want to restrict the updates to photos only, then you may do:

  @Override
  public boolean checkGlobalFlags(Update update) {
    return Flag.PHOTO;
  }

Custom Command Processing

Command Prefix

Customizing the command prefix is as simple as overriding the getCommandPrefix method as shown below.

@Override
protected String getCommandPrefix() {
  return "!";
}

Command Regex Split

The method that the bot uses to capture command tokens is through the regex splitters. By default, it's set to " ". However, this can be customized. For example, if you'd like to split on digits and whitespaces, then you may do the following:

@Override
protected String getCommandRegexSplit() {
  return "\\s\\d";
}

Commands with Continuous Text

Feeling ambitious? You may allow your bot to process tokens that are technically attached to your command. Imagine you have a command /do and you'd like users to send commands as /do1 and still trigger the do ability. In order to do that, override the allowContinuousText function.

@Override
protected boolean allowContinuousText() {
  return true;
}

Please note that this may cause ability overlap. If multiple abilities can match the same command, the longest match will be taken. For example, if you have two abilities do and do1, the command /do1 will trigger the do1 ability.

Statistics

AbilityBot can accrue basic statistics about the usage of your abilities and replies. Simply enableStats() on an Ability builder or enableStats(<name>) on replies to activate this feature. Once activated, you may call /stats and the bot will print a basic list of statistics. At the moment, AbilityBot only tracks hits. In the future, this will be enhanced to track more stats.

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