This tutorial will show you how to acquire opt-ins to Facebook and Facebook Messenger and send messages using Enterprise Communications API's and Ruby. Click the "Start" button below to start the tutorial.
Start TutorialThis short tutorial will show you how to obtain a Facebook Messenger Id for a user using the Send to Messenger web plugin from Facebook, and then how to send the user a message using the Enterprise Communications API.
To begin with you will need the following prerequisites installed:
In the tutorials folder you will find a simple web site created using Ruby on Rails that renders a single page which contains the Send to Messenger web plugin populated with the correct secure metadata to allow Enterprise Communications API to capture and associate the Facebook Messenger Id with a Enterprise Communications API profile. Once the Send to Messenger has been pressed some test buttons will be shown, these will demonstrate sending simple text and rich Facebook messages via Enterprise Communications API.
To setup this project do the following:
gem install rails
Once installed you can check all is working by requesting the version of Ruby on Rails by running:
rails --version
Next we will configure the web site for your Facebook page and Enterprise Communications API API Space
The Facebook Send to Messenger control will only render if the the Facebook channel has been setup with your Facebook page in the Enterprise Communications API portal. Follow the these instructions to setup your Facebook channel in Enterprise Communications API if you haven't already done so.
You need to know you Facebook page numeric id for the web plugin. If you don't know this, then the simpliest way of finding it is via https://findmyfbid.com/, simply open this site and paste in your Facebook pages URL to obtain the Facebook page id.
In the .\views\index.html.erb
file (highlighted) the div the Send to Messenger control renders into needs the page_id
setting to your
Facebook pages numeric id; do this now.
The code merges some meta-data into the data-ref
property of the Send to Messenger div. This meta-data is used to associate the
Facebook Messenger Id with a Enterprise Communications API profile and is essential. The next steps will explain how to obtain this meta-data.
Enterprise Communications API provides a web service to create secure encypted meta-data to be
passed to the Facebook Send to Messenger web plugin in the data-ref
property. This web service is called each time the web page is rendered
and should be passed the profileId you want to associate the Facebook Messenger Id to as a minimum, but you can pass any other data you want
adding to the profile.
In this case we have hardcoded the profileId
to `joe.blogs@acme.com` but in reality you should pass the unique id you use to identify customers or visitors.
In order for the Facebook meta-data web service call to work your must add your Enterprise Communications API API Space details.
Enter your API Space Id, this is used to identify the partition Enterprise Communications API uses for data storage and configuration.
To find your API Space Id you can select which API Space you want to work with by selecting it from the API Space drop down at the top of the page in the Enterprise Communications API portal. (Highlighted in yellow below)
Once selected open the API Space configuration section by clicking on the Hub -> API Space Details menu item on the left of the page and your API Space Id will be shown along with other details. (Highlighted in green below)
Enter your access token, this is used to authenticate and authorise your API calls to Enterprise Communications API. Ensure your token has permissions to send messages and use the SMS channel.
If you need to create an access token you can do so by clicking on the Access Tokens option in the Hub section of the left hand menu. Click the Add new access token button and fill in the Name and Profile fields. The Name field describes the access token or its intended purpose such as the system that will use it. The ProfileId field is for setting the identity for the token i.e. the Enterprise Communications API profile this token represents. This is particularly useful for App Messaging where you want to message users as a virtual system user.
There are a many different sets of permissions to choose from, but for our purposes simply select all the One API Access - All Channels + Branch, as we want our system to send messages on any channel.
Now scroll to the bottom of the page and hit Create
Your access token will be shown with a convenient copy button on the right hand side (highlighted in green below) Ensure you copy this now and store it somewhere safe as it cannot be retrieved once you have navigated away from this page for security reasons.
To run the website now it's configured simply open a console in the tutorials folder and run:
rails server
If all has worked you can now browse the website at http://localhost:3000/ which should look like:
Click on the Send to Messenger button and if required login to Facebook. In the background Facebook will send the opt-in information to Enterprise Communications API, where we will decrypt and validate the metadata. If the metadata is valid Enterprise Communications API will either append the fbMessengerId to an existing profile or create a profile using the details provided.
Once you have opted in find your profile in the Enterprise Communications API portal and check to see if you have a fbMessengerId field with a long numeric id, if so you are now ready to send a Facebook message, otherwise please go back and check you have completed all the necessary steps.
Sending messages to Facebook is very simple now that you have an opted in user with their Facebook Id (fbMessngerId) stored against their Enterprise Communications API profile. To send a simple text based message you simply make a REST call to the Enterprise Communications API referencing the recipients profileId in the to section, set a body message and target the fbMessenger channel. Some basic code to do this is highlighted.
Set the profileId to the user you opted in on the website in the example it was `joe.blogs@acme.com; Enterprise Communications API will then automatically access
the **fbMessengerId** field from the profile to send the message via Facebook. You can target a user on Facebook explicitly if you have their Facebook
Messenger Id already by adding it the the
toobject in the request as
fbMessengerId`.
Enterprise Communications API will automatically create a Facebook Messenger message from your body text, making text based messages very easy indeed, set your message text now.
Run the website by opening a console in the tutorials folder and running:
rails server
If all has worked you can now browse the website at http://localhost:3000/
Now click the Send to Messenger button, and follow the instructions, including logging into Facebook if prompted.
Click on the Send Simple Test Message button, you should receive your Facebook message very shortly, check your Facebook account online or via Facebook Messenger.
Facebook messenger can support various types of rich content including:
You can send any of the Facebook message body types if you use the customBody property and define a fbMessenger object (highlighted) within it that complies with the Facebook Graph API's message object as defined in the Facebook docs.
Find out more about sending custom bodies with the Facebook channel here
Click on the Send Rich Test Message button, you should receive your rich Facebook message very shortly, check your Facebook account online or via Facebook Messenger.
Thanks for taking the time to look through the tutorial, to find out more visit our full documentation.