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nyaruka / goflow

Flow engine for RapidPro/TextIt.
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Figure out strategy for group msgs #18

Closed nicpottier closed 6 years ago

nicpottier commented 7 years ago

Likely solution is something where we return a context of the flow at that place and it is up to container to deal with substituting contact vars

rowanseymour commented 7 years ago

For reference this is what that looks like in the current expression engine https://github.com/rapidpro/expressions/blob/master/python/temba_expressions/evaluator.py#L307

nicpottier commented 7 years ago

Ya, that's one approach is to try to evaluate everything you can then return a new template. I haven't convinced myself that that is always right given that what a variable evaluates to is context dependent. (say based on what function it is being used with)

Need to think through some of the weirder edge cases.

rowanseymour commented 7 years ago

So here's a bold thought - what if interacting with (e.g. messaging) other contacts (besides the contact) within a flow has always been a bit of a hack, and a better solution would be say that you can only trigger new flow sessions for other contacts?

Otherwise I can't think of any mechanism that avoids sending a template back to the container and saying you need to evaluate this... which really is the job of the flow engine.

If you want to message a group from a flow - then start that group in a new flow which sends that message.

nicpottier commented 7 years ago

That's not a bad idea, fits the everything is a flow model, though with that comes all the baggage of interrupting people in flows which we still (STILL) don't have a good story for. If we could solve that then I could see that being a reasonable strategy. Would have to glance at current usage to see how popular group messaging really is.

rowanseymour commented 7 years ago

We just chatted about this and current preferred solution is to allow messages to be sent to other contacts, but @contact is still the flow contact and we'd get rid of @step.contact. This would make it behave similarly to the send_email.

nicpottier commented 6 years ago

No group messages, only flow starts.