wiki.ziemers.de

A microservice for a Chatbot developed at the Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin

1. Mensa Microservice
2. Table Of Content
3. Getting Started

   1. Prerequisites
   2. Cloning
   3. Installing
4. Overview
5. Structure
6. Functionalities
7. The Services-Folder

   1. generateResponse.js
   2. mealService.js
   3. mealsOfSpecificDayService.js
8. The Routes-Folder
9. Further Development
10. Further Reading
11. Built With
12. Versioning
13. Authors

- node.js
- express.js

Get the source code by cloning its repository via https: mensa_microservice

After cloning the repository, you will need to make sure that you have node and npm installed on your working system. To check if you already have node installed, try

node –version

Same for checking if npm is installed, just with npm instead of the node command

npm –version

If you don't have node or npm installed, download the software via the links provided in Prerequisites or search for them via your preferred search engine(DuckDuckGo).

After that install all necessesary dependencies in the directory where the package.json exists

npm install

Now you can start the local development server to play around with the API and make your calls

npm run dev

This will fire up a development server that listens on port 8000.

If you direct your browser to http://localhost:8000/meals, you will get a list of the meal plan of the actual day for the mensa at the Beuth University for Applied Sciences.

The mensa microservice is basically a Node-Express-Backend. Incoming requests are checked and specifically handled.

The microservice consists of four folders containing several scripts, which are designated to perform certain tasks. Then we have the services-folder containing files, that consist of functions useful to process incoming requests from the chatbot and to generate a formatted answer-string, that contains the requested meal-menu of a specific day from the Beuth mensa. The routes-folder consists of all the routes, that can be addressed. In the next chapters we will get into more details about the scripts and their functions.

On request, this microservice makes calls to the OpenMensa API. The received data is processed by services that give a list of filtered and unfiltered meals of the mensa of the Beuth University for Applied Sciences. Mainly this service was built throughout the Masterprojekt module that is a mandatory part of the media informatics master course of the Beuth University for Applied Sciences.

This folder consists of several services, that perform specific tasks for the microservice.

Creates a nicely formatted string from a mensa-JSON-object and caches it.

Makes a request to the OpenMensa API and filters by given entities (for instance vegan and vegetarian meals only).

This folder contains all the routes, that can be addressed on this server. The `index.js` manages all the routes. We've only got two routes in our project. The `/swagger`-route leads you to the swagger documentation of this project.

The `/meals`-route will be called by another component of the Beuthbot via `POST`. It expects a message JSON-object containing the requested date for the meals and the filters - to request only specific meals. It then calls all the functions needed to perform requests and generates an answer, which is finally send back as a response to the Chatbot.

This is still a work in progress, so functionalities and structure might still change during development

- OpenMensa API

- Node.js
- Express.js
- Axios

We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

- Tolga Karaoglu
- Steven Sobkowski

See also the list of contributors.