How to run background service in Oracle MAF

In mobile apps, we often need some services to run in the background to do tasks like fetching or updating data from a server, sync local data with a server, invoking APIs etc.
In this post, we will see how to run a task in the background of a mobile app developed using Oracle MAF.

There is a default utility available in Oracle MAF to run java code in background threads which is MafExecutorService. It has a method execute() to run java runnable on a background thread in the context of the calling thread's MAF feature context. The syntax of the method is like

MafExecutorService.execute(new Runnable()
{
public void run()
{
         //Invoke your methods here     
}
});

If you update any data change events in the background, invoke below method to make it effective.

AdfmfJavaUtilities.flushDataChangeEvent();

Oracle Intelligent Bots: Get the user Geo location from the map

For few use cases like delivering a Pizza, it would be a great user experience to take user's current location directly from a Map instead of asking the user to type his address.

In this post, we will see how to capture the user location from a map in a chatbot developed in Oracle ChatBots.

Oracle bots provide a component "System.CommonResponse" which helps us here to get the location. Below is the snippet to get the location.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 userLocation:
    component: "System.CommonResponse"
    properties:
      processUserMessage: true
      keepTurn: false
      variable: "loc"
      nlpResultVariable:
      maxPrompts:
      translate:
      metadata:
        responseItems: 
        - type: "text"
          text: "OK.. Please provide your address to deliver the Pizza?"
          iteratorVariable:
          separateBubbles: false
          rendered: 
        globalActions:
        - label: "Send Location"
          type: "location" 
    transitions:
      actions:
        locationReceived: "locMapReceived"
        textReceived: "locTextReceived"

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The above code results as below image.

When the user clicks on the "Send Location" button, it will open the map application. The user can select current or any other location and submit. Once the user submits the location, the bot will receive a JSON into the variable assigned for it which is "loc" in the above example and invokes state assigned to the action "locationReceived". The JSON looks like as below. 

{"latitude":17.727758609852,"title":"Learning's Location","url":"<url of the map>","longitude":83.287353515625}

The JSON contains, latitude, longitude, title of the location on the map and the direct url to the selected location.

In the above example we have another action "textReceived" which helps to handle if user inputs text instead of selection on map.

Note: While implementing this, please check if your client application supports this feature and maps. I tested this with FB and Test console.

Oracle Intelligent Bots - Integration with Smooch

Smooch is the complete messaging platform for enterprise software makers. To know more about Smooch click here. Oracle Intelligent Bot made it very easy to integrate your bot with Smooch.

In this post, we will see how to integrate #chatbot developed in Oracle Intelligent Bot(#OracleMobile) with Smooch to open as a web page. Below is the procedure to do the same.

• Create a channel in the bot for Smooch. To do so,
• Goto settings of the bot
• Select Channels tab
• Click on "+Channel" to create a new channel

• Enter Name and Description
• Select Channel Type "Web". You can see a window like below

• Click on Create
• You can see a screen like below which contains an app id and app secret to connecting with the clients

• Preparing a smooch client to connect with the bot
• In this example, we use a web client to connect with the bot
• Refer this smooch page and download/create the HTML page from https://github.com/smooch/smooch-web
• Replace the app id with the id created above
• Run the web page, you will see a chat widget on the page as below

• Click on the chat icon and start your conversation with the bot