WxT-QA-BOT

This Webex Teams bot is being developed to help Cisco and IBM volunteers that will be supporting teachers and charities, across the UK, to access free video conferencing through the use of Cisco Webex Meetings

Starting the service

To start the API service, use the script start_flask.sh.

Front-end Information

• Front-end is a simple static .HTML site with a form pushing to our API route /addEntry
• Utilising StatiCrypt for simple page encryption (https://www.npmjs.com/package/staticrypt)
• Page hosted at https://app.netlify.com/sites/suspicious-mayer-f99e85/overview using my netlify account
• Currently manually deploying the site due to having to run the staticrypt script after updating, but this could be automated with a pipeline

Back-end Information

• Flask
• Two functions currently implemented:
  • getAnswer() (/getAnswer or /getAnswer/<question>) returns the answer given a question, as well as the location of an associated resource
  • addEntry() (/addEntry) inserts a new row into qanda given a tag, question, answer, and (optionally) a location
• Default limit is 100 requests per day, 10 requests per hour (per IP address)
• getAnswer() is additionally limited to 1 request per minute
• addEntry() is exempt from limits

GCP SQL Info

• Database Name : qanda | Database Table : qanda

Database

If the API throws an error, check that the MySQL service is running. You can restart the service with the following command:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

The table structure is as follows:

id INT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
tag VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
question VARCHAR(2000) NOT NULL,
answer VARCHAR(2000) NOT NULL,
location VARCHAR(255)