Do you need to save ParseUser before Cloud Function Calls? - unity3d

I have an app on unity that uses ParseUser to store the user Level and Experience. When the user reaches a new Level a ParseCloud function call is made. However whenever user is retrieved via:
Parse.Cloud.define("LevelUp", function (request, response){
var user = request.user;
});
All the attributes in user have the values that are currently saved on the database, but not the ones that the ParseUser that made the request have in the Parse client.
Do I need to call ParseUser.CurrentUser.SaveAsync(); before every call to the server to get current user values or is there a way to send the dirty ParseUser values to the ParseCloud function and update them from that function.
Thanks!

Short answer yes.
Long answer: Not necessarily, but you need to wrap the unsaved (or dirty) attributes in an object and send it to ParseCloud, due the fact that you can't send ParseObject in a ParseCloud call.
In my case, I ended up changing the approach: retrieve the necessary
information about the level, and do the modifications on the ParseUser on the client.

Related

How to write the query function for checking duplicate registereD in Appwrite using Flutter

I'm a new intern at this small tech company that uses appwrite as a database for developing mobile applications using flutter. The task was to check if there are duplicate registration IDs in Appwrite database and, if there are, notify users that the ID already exists and ask them to enter a different registration ID when completing their user profile. The query function for checking duplicate IDs is proving to be a challenge for me because I'm a newbie to flutter and appwrite.  
It first checks whether the registryID parameter is successfully received, and returns the registration ID under the registryID column in the Appwrite document, but when printing out the result, it returns an empty map. So I believe I somehow wrote the function incorrectly.
Future<dynamic> checkDuplicateID(String registerID) async{
try {
dynamic res = await db.listDocuments(
collectionId: kycCollectionId,
queries: [
Query.equal('registryId', registerID),
]
);
} on AppwriteException catch(e) {
print(e.toString());
}
}
here is the appwrite image that contains document information and registryID row
In submit button section where the user submits her information, I used a provider package and called the checkDuplicateID method and passed the id "UKH00250238", which is repeated twice in the database.
onTap: () {
dynamic result = state.checkDuplicateID('UKH00250238');
}
If the above function is incorrect, how do I write a function in which I can pass a registerID as a parameter and check if the id is already repeated? If my implementation is incorrect, what are the other ways to check duplicate IDs in the Appwrite?
Your checkDuplicateID() function should probably return something to indicate whether there's a duplicate or not. Otherwise, the function seems fine, assuming the user has access to the data.
Your next step is probably to have some sort of UI to collect input from the user so that you can pass it into your checkDuplicateID() function. The Flutter Docs have plenty of resources you can use, like this.
If you still need help from the Appwrite size, feel free to join the Appwrite Discord server.

Facebook Messenger Bot Proactive/Push Notifications using Azure

I am building a bot for for Facebook Messenger using Microsoft Bot Framework. I am planning to use CosmosDB for State Management and also as my backend data store. (I am not stuck to CosmosBD and can use any other store if needed)
I need to send daily/weekly proactive messages(push notifications) to users based on their time preference. I will capturing their time preference when they first interact with the bot.
What is the best way to deliver these notifications?
As I will be storing these preferences in CosmosDB, I am thinking using ComosDB trigger of creating an Azure Function and schedule it based on the user time preference. This Azure function will make a call to my webhook which will deliver these messages. If requried, I will change Function schedule when a user changes his/her preference.
My questions are:
Is this a good approach?
Are there any other alternatives (Notifications Hub?)
I should be able to set specific times for notifications (like at the top of the hour or something like that), does it make sense to schedule an Azure Function to run at these hours rather than creating a function based on user preference (I can actually combine these two approaches too)
Thank you in advance.
First, I don't think there's any "right" answer to be given here; it's going to depend a lot on your domain's specific needs. Scale is going to play a major factor in the design of this. Will you have 100 users? 10000 users? 1mil users? I'm going to assume you want to design for maximum scale up front, but it could be overkill.
First, based on what you've described, I don't think a CosmosDB trigger is necessarily the solution to your problem because that's only going to fire when the preference data is created/updated. I assume that, from that point forward, your function needs to continuously fire at the time slot they've opted into, correct?
So let's pretend you let people choose from the 24hrs in the day. A naïve approach would be to simply use a scheduled trigger that fires up every hour, queries the CosmosDB for all the documents where the preference is set to that particular hour and then begins sending out notifications from there. The problem is how you scale from there and deal with issues of idempotency in the face of failures.
First off, a timer trigger only ever spins up one instance. If you were to just go query the CosmosDB documents and start processing them one by one in the scope of that single trigger, you'd hit a ceiling relatively quickly on how many notifications you can scale to. Instead what you'd want to do is use that timer trigger to fan out the notifications to as many "worker" function instances as possible. The timer trigger can act as the orchestrator in the sense that it can own the query against the CosmosDB and then turn each document result it finds for that particular notification time window into a message that it places on a queue to be processed by a separate function which will scale out on its own.
There are actually a couple ways you can accomplish this with Azure Functions, it really depends on how early an adopter of technology you are comfortable with being.
The first is what I would call the "manual" way which would be done by simply using the existing Azure Storage Queue extension by taking an IAsyncCollector<YourNotificationWorkerMessage> as a parameter to the timer function that's bound to the worker queue and then pumping out the messages through that. Then you write a second companion function which uses a QueueTrigger, bind it to that same queue, and it will take care of processing each message. This second function is where you get the scaling, enabling process all of the queued messages as quickly as possible based on whatever scaling parameters you choose to configure. This is the "simplest" approach
The second approach would be to adopt the newer Durable Functions extension. With that model, you don't have to directly think about creating a worker queue. You simply kick off a new instance of your orchestrator function from the timer function and the orchestrator fans out the work by invoking N "concurrent" calls to an action for each notification. Now, it happens to distribute those calls using queues under the covers, but that's an implementation detail that you need no longer maintain yourself. Additionally, if the work of delivering the notification requires more involved work and/or retry logic, you might actually consider using a sub-orchestration instead of a simple action. Finally, another added benefit of this approach, is that you can "fan back in" to your main orchestrator function once all the notifications are delivered to do some follow up work... even if that's simply some kind of event logging that the notification cycle has completed for this hour.
Now, the challenge with either of these approach is actually dealing with failure in initially fetching the candidates for notification from CosmosDB, paging through the results and making sure you actually fan all of them out in an idempotent manner. You need to deal with possible hiccups as you page and you need to deal with the fact that your whole function could be torn down and you might have to restart. Perhaps on the initial run of the 8AM notifications you got through page 273 out of 371 pages and then you got hit with a complete network connectivity fail or the VM your function was running on suffered a power failure. You could resume, but you'd need to know that you left off on page 273 and that you actually processed the 27th record out of that page and start from there. Otherwise, you risk sending double notifications to your users. Maybe that's something you can accept, maybe it's not. Maybe you're ok with the 27 notifications on that page being duplicated as long as the first 272 pages aren't. Again, this is something you need to decide for your domain, but if you want to avoid this issue your orchestrator function will need to track its progress to ensure that it doesn't send out dupes. Again I would say Durable Functions has a leg up here as it comes with the ability to configure retries. Maintaining the state of a particular run is left up to the author in either approach though.
I use pro-active dialog extensively with botframwork and messenger without any issue. During your facebook approval process you simply need to inform them you will be sending notifications trough messenger with your bot. Usually if you use it to inform your user and stay away from promotional content you should be fine.
I also use azure function to trigger the pro-active dialog from a custom controller endpoint.
Bellow sample code for azure function:
public static void Run(TimerInfo notificationTrigger, TraceWriter log)
{
try
{
//Serialize request object
string timerInfo = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(notificationTrigger);
//Create a request for bot service with security token
HttpRequestMessage hrm = new HttpRequestMessage()
{
Method = HttpMethod.Post,
RequestUri = new Uri(NotificationEndPointUrl),
Content = new StringContent(timerInfo, Encoding.UTF8, "application/json")
};
hrm.Headers.Add("Authorization", NotificationApiKey);
log.Info(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(hrm));
//Call service
using (var client = new HttpClient())
{
Task task = client.SendAsync(hrm).ContinueWith((taskResponse) =>
{
HttpResponseMessage result = taskResponse.Result;
var jsonString = result.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
jsonString.Wait();
if (result.StatusCode != System.Net.HttpStatusCode.OK)
{
//Throw what ever problem as an exception with details
throw new Exception($"AzureFunction - ERRROR - HTTP {result.StatusCode}");
}
});
task.Wait();
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
//TODO log
}
}
Bellow sample code for starting the pro-active dialog:
public static async Task Resume<T, R>(string resumptionCookie) where T : IDialog<R>, new()
{
//Deserialize reference to conversation
ConversationReference conversationReference = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<ConversationReference>(resumptionCookie);
//Generate message from bot to user
var message = conversationReference.GetPostToBotMessage();
var builder = new ContainerBuilder();
using (var scope = DialogModule.BeginLifetimeScope(Conversation.Container, message))
{
//From a cold start the service is not yet authenticated with dev bot azure services
//We thus must trust endpoint url.
if (!MicrosoftAppCredentials.IsTrustedServiceUrl(message.ServiceUrl))
{
MicrosoftAppCredentials.TrustServiceUrl(message.ServiceUrl, DateTime.MaxValue);
}
var botData = scope.Resolve<IBotData>();
await botData.LoadAsync(CancellationToken.None);
//This is our dialog stack
var task = scope.Resolve<IDialogTask>();
T dialog = scope.Resolve<T>(); //Resolve the dialog using autofac
try
{
task.Call(dialog.Void<R, IMessageActivity>(), null);
await task.PollAsync(CancellationToken.None);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
//TODO log
}
finally
{
//flush dialog stack
await botData.FlushAsync(CancellationToken.None);
}
}
}
Your dialog needs to be registered in autofac.
Your resumptionCookie needs to be saved in your db.
You might want to check FB policy regarding proactive messages
There’s a 24h limit but it might not be totally screwed in your case
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/policy/policy-overview#standard_messaging

How to get the current user using jsonwebtoken in Sails.js?

I've been working with Sails since couple of weeks ago, I came from Rails and I don't have any experience working with Node.js.
Now I'm trying to make a robust token authentication using jsonwebtoken.
https://github.com/auth0/node-jsonwebtoken
I followed this guide http://thesabbir.com/how-to-use-json-web-token-authentication-with-sails-js/ and everything worked fine.
I'm able to make a sign up, sign in and then use the token correctly for different actions.
Now, there are some actions where I'd like to use the login user,
something like devise current_user helper.
For example, when creating a comment, this comment should belongs to the current user.
Using Sabbir Ahmed guide, in the line 33 from the isAuthorized.js policy the token gets decrypted so I can get the current user id from there.
So, my question is, what should be the best way to get the current user and be able to use it later in some controller?
For example I tried something like:
# isAuthorized.js line 34, after getting decrypted token
User.findOne({id: token.id}).exec(function findOneCB(err, found){
currentUser = found;
});
But, on this way, because this is an async action I can't use this currentUser in a controller.
I want to store the current user in order to be able to use it later in some controller without repeated the same code in each controller, something like a helper or maybe a service.
The trick is where you place the next(). Since you are making an async call, the control should only be transferred to next policy/ controller once the database action is competed.
You should modify the policy to:
User.findOne({id: token.id}).exec(function findOneCB(err, found){
if(err) next(err);
req.currentUser = found;
next();
});
And you should be able to access the user details in controllers that use isAuthorized policy via req.currentUser
If by
For example, when creating a comment, this comment should belongs to the current user.
what you mean is certain attributes like username, and country etc, rather than querying the database after verification, what you can choose to do is to send these additional attributes to jwToken.issue in api/controllers/UsersController.js
eg.
jwToken.issue({
id: user.id,
username: user.name,
country: user.country
})
How that helps is, you can keep api/policies/isAuthorized.js as is, and in all the controllers that you use in the future, you can access the payload values from as
token.username or token.country
Instead of having to query the database again, thereby saving you valuable response time.
Beware however, of the data you choose to send in the token (you could also send {user:user} if you want to) however, as the secret key or hashing is not required to decrypt the payload as you can figure # jwt.io , you might want to exercise restraint.

Sail.js - routing to methods, custom policies & PATCH method

I have a few questions that I couldn't find answers anywhere online.
Does sails.js framework support HTTP PATCH method? If not - does anyone know if there is a planned feature in the future?
By default if I create method in a controller it is accessible with GET request is it the routes.js file where I need to specify that method is accessible only via POST or other type of methods?
How would you create a policy that would allow to change protected fields on entity only for specific rights having users. I.e: user that created entity can change "name", "description" fields but would not be able to change "comments" array unless user is ADMIN?
How would you add a custom header to "find" method which specifies how many items there are in database? I.e.: I have /api/posts/ and I do query for finding specific items {skip: 20; limit: 20} I would like to get response with those items and total count of items that would match query without SKIP and LIMIT modifiers. One thing that comes to my mind is that a policy that adds that that custom header would be a good choice but maybe there is a better one.
Is there any way to write a middle-ware that would be executed just before sending response to the client. I.e.: I just want to filter output JSON not to containt some values or add my own without touching the controller method.
Thank you in advance
I can help with 2 and 5. In my own experience, here is what I have done:
2) I usually just check req.method in the controller. If it's not a method I want to support, I respond with a 404 page. For example:
module.exports = {
myAction: function(req, res){
if (req.method != 'POST')
return res.notFound();
// Desired controller action logic here
}
}
5) I create services in api/services when I want to do this. You define functions in a service that accept callbacks as arguments so that you can then send your response from the controller after the service function finishes executing. You can access any service by the name of the file. For example, if I had MyService.js in api/services, and I needed it to work with the request body, I would add a function to it like this:
exports.myServiceFunction = function(requestBody, callback){
// Work with the request body and data access here to create
// data to give back to the controller
callback(data);
};
Then, I can use this service from the controller like so:
module.exports = {
myAction: function(req, res){
MyService.myServiceFunction(req.body, function(data){
res.json(data);
});
}
}
In your case, the data that the service sends back to the controller through the callback would be the filtered JSON.
I'm sorry I can't answer your other questions, but I hope this helps a bit. I'm still new to Sails.js and am constantly learning new things, so others might have better suggestions. Still, I hope I have answered two of your questions.

store and setRequest

I have a jobque mechanism in ZF.
The jobque simlpy stores the the function call (Class, Method and params) and later executes it as CLI daemon. The daemon works, however at places the application looks for information from the request object, and when called from the CLI these places fail, or get no info.
I would like to store the original request object together with the job and when the job is processed set the request object back as if the job was done by the originall request, somethin along the line of the following pseudo code:
$ser_request = serialize(Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance ()->getRequest ());
-->save to db
-->retrive from db
$ZCF= new Zend_Controller_Front;
$ZCF::getInstance ()->setRequest (unserialize($ser_request))
The aim is to store and replay the jobs later withouth having to change the rest of the application.
Any suggestions how to do that?
I am not sure if this works, but here's an idea. Try to implement _sleep and _wakeup magic methods for the request object. Haven't tried it out, but maybe it's at least a starting solution.