Add flowdock "activity" to the hubot adapter

[ojacques]

I would like to start implementing "activity" type of messages, as per this API doc https://www.flowdock.com/api/message-types#/activity

The first use case is to create activities for Gerrit events coming from Hubot Gerrit script - https://github.com/github/hubot-scripts/blob/master/src/scripts/gerrit.coffee

At a first look, I need to modify both.

Any recommendation on implementing this on the flowdock adapter? I'd like to do it right.

[Mumakil]

You don't really need the flowdock adapter for this, since posting to the activity api requires just a source token and a simple json payload. We've done something similar with hubot-deploy-status so you can look at that repo for starters.

https://github.com/flowdock/hubot-deploy-status/blob/master/src/cron.coffee runs a cron job to query github for deployment events for configured repositories and checks if the deployments are up to date with the master branch. It has an adapter configuration parameter, which can be used to tell it to use a specific formatter and api endpoint for reporting the results. There's a very simple default adapter at https://github.com/flowdock/hubot-deploy-status/blob/master/src/adapters/default.coffee that just uses hubot to send a chat message, but the flowdock adapter at https://github.com/flowdock/hubot-deploy-status/blob/master/src/adapters/flowdock.coffee is probably what you're looking for: it formats a Flowdock specific result and posts it to the activities api.

That way any hubot users can use the script in the generic form, but the richer Flowdock api can also be leveraged.

[ojacques]

Thanks @Mumakil !

Thanks for pointing to the deploy-status example, very instructive.

From what I understand, I will have to duplicate the adapters/flowdock.coffee everytime I need to have an hubot script which posts to the activities API.

Wouldn't it make sense to include the activity FD API as part of the main flowdock adapter? Maybe hubot adapters don't even allow that by design...

[Mumakil]

We could maybe make a wrapper for it in the node-flowdock package. The reason why I'm hesitant to add it here is that:

• The hubot adapter interface is pretty well defined and nothing like the activity posting is included there. So everything that's not in the base adapter won't anyways work out of the box with different adapters.
• The hard part with using the activity api is that every different application or script needs to figure out how to form the data for the activity to be posted (and that data different for every application, thus making sharing any code pretty difficult). After you have the data formatted, it's just a simple http post request with that data.

[ojacques]

Makes a lot of sense. Thanks for all your support! :+1: Closing this one.