Bips

Bips are ephemeral endpoints which consume or emit messages to be transformed or relayed across many different services over a [graph](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_graph) based pipeline called a hub. They act as a thin layer between the outside world and channels enabled on an account, and orchestrate the interactions between different component services.

3 Flavors

There's a few different types of bip which you can use to perform work which have been selected to address some common use cases. They are SMTP (Email), HTTP (Web Hooks) and Triggers (Event Emitters) and indicate which protocol a bip should listen on or which event to fire. When configuring a bip the type and config parameters will indicate the bips overarching behavior.

smtp is an inbound SMTP endpoint (email address/alias) which acts as any other email address but is an inbound receiver only. smtp bips accept email and then distribute that message including any attachments across their delivery graph (hub).

http is a web hook which can accept GET/POST requests and push whatever messages it receives across the hub. PUT/DELETE is not supported.

trigger is managed by the trigger scheduler/cron and has no public facing endpoint. Triggers are bound to a certain class of action/channel called an emitter, and they fire periodically to poll for changes or new messages from whichever channel they're bound to.

Files can be posted to http bips, attached to smtp bips, appear via triggers or be generated by channels on a hub.

Attributes

name (string, optional) is the unique name which becomes part of the Email, Webook or Trigger endpoint you create. For smtp bips, name should be an RFC821 parsable (mailbox portion) email address. When a name has not been supplied the system will create a unique short name automatically in its place.

domain_id (UUID, optional) Because bips are named enpoints, they can be attached (softly) to specific domains and namespaced to an app or subdomian. domain_id is the id pointer to the domains resource, the bip should listen on. If domain_id is not supplied on bip creation, the default account_option.bip_domain_id will be applied.

note (text, optional) any extra notes you want to attach to this bip can be put here.

end_life (object, optional) is a simple expiry structure which indicates at what time, or after how many impressions, this bip should expire. eg:

{
  time : '+1d',
  imp : 10,
  action : 'pause'
}

time is any datejs parsable time or UTC timestamp. When expiries are saved in a parsable string format, they are automatically converted to UTC.

imp is an integer which defines the upper limit of impressions for this bip.

action is applied to either pause or delete the bip when either of time or imp conditions are met.

end_life is only enforced if either time or imp are present. If they're skipped on POST and you have an account_option with a default end_life structure, that setting will apply. Similarly, if action has not been supplied the account_option.bip_expiry_behavior setting will apply.

To skip all expiry, set end_life and time to 0.

paused (boolean, optional) Paused bips are still present in the system but do not actively respond to requests, or in the case of Triggers, do not poll for content or emit events.

binder (string array, optional) Array of IPV4,IPV6 or sender email addresses or [ 'first' ]. Use 'first' to bind with the first connecting client. binder is a soft ACL which performs an IP/Email sender check before processing.

app_id (string, optional) Application Tag.

icon (string, optional) Sometimes you can have so many bips that its hard to tell looking at them what they do or where they're from. You can add an optional icon image to a bip for rendering to make them easier to identify. If a bip has been created with a HTTP REFERER header, and that referer domain has a favicon.ico, icon Bipio will automatically grab that icon and inject it into config.

type (string, optional, http|smtp|trigger) Indicates the type of bip this should be.

• http is a HTTP endpoint, which resolve to http://{username}.{host}/bip/http/{bip name}
• smtp is an inbound email alias, {bip name}@{username}.{host}
• trigger will invoke its emitter channel as specified in config, periodically

config (object) Type Specific Config.

• For http

  • exports Array of named attributes to transform. These named attributes are hints for transformation against GET parameters supplied when invoking the Bip, or JSON decoded body data. Export hints for embedded objects (eg: { some_object : { abc : "123" } }) are not currently supported. The system provides two default exports 'for free' which are interpreted as query parameters for the purpose of generating transforms, title and body
  • auth (string) Auth means the HTTP Basic Auth credentials that are required by a client of this HTTP bip. String of type :
    • none Disables authentication
    • token To use default account token (Basic Auth)
    • basic To use custom username/password (Basic Auth)
  • username (string) http basic username, where auth = basic
  • password (string) http basic password, where auth = basic
  • renderer (object) Allows Bips to serve Channel content directly while inheriting 'bip-like' characteristics (lifespan, custom credentials etc). HTTP Bips with a renderer setting make hub configs non-mandatory. Object keyed by :
    • channel_id Target Channel Id
    • renderer Pod Renderer name
    • query Additional URI GET query string without prefixing '?'. Any additional parameters passed into the bip will append to this query.

• For trigger

  • channel_id Triggering Channel Id, must be a Channel marked as an emitter with _emitter : true.

hub (object, optional) The hub is the most complex part of a bip, it does all the work. Hub is a graph structure where each vertex is a 'channel', and every edge defines a data transform mapping the export (output) from a parent channel to the import (input) of the target channel. Hubs are always processed starting with the source vertex, which is the bip content source. Every channel (including source) which exports data upstream uses this object structure, keyed by 'source' or export creating channel id :

• {source|channel id} (object)
  • edges (array) Array of target channel id's
  • transforms (object, optional) export > import transformation rules, keyed to target channel id.
    • {channel id} (object) key/value list of channel id's imports : parent export.

Transforms are simple text templates that you can interpolate parent exports into. Exports take the form [%(source|channel id)#export name%], for example : [%source#subject%]

You can concatenate exports together to create an import, and include your own text :

"body_text" : "I got an email from [%_client#repr%] with the subject [%source#subject%]!!"

Decorators

• _href (URI) Fully Qualified Resource URI
• _repr (String) Derived representation
• _imp_actual (Integer) Number of impressions

Some examples

A simple Email Repeater, lets say you have an email.smtp_forward channel (id d8c35967-d9f4-427b-9aaf-bd542d5e2931) and you want to map an SMTP bip's exports in a 1:1 import match to this channel. Visually it may look like so :

The hub would be :

"hub": {
  "source": {
    "transforms": {
      "d8c35967-d9f4-427b-9aaf-bd542d5e2931": {
        "reply_to": "[%source#reply_to%]",
        "body_text": "[%source#body_text%]",
        "body_html": "[%source#body_html%]",
        "subject": "[%source#subject%]"
      }
    },
    "edges": [
      "d8c35967-d9f4-427b-9aaf-bd542d5e2931"
    ]
  }
}

---

A more complex example, with a HTTP Bip exporting to an email and an optionally filtered RSS Channel

"hub": {
  "source": {
    "transforms": {
      "d8c35967-d9f4-427b-9aaf-bd542d5e2931": {
        "body_html": "[%source#body%]",
        "subject": "[%source#title%]"
      }
    },
    "edges": [
      "d8c35967-d9f4-427b-9aaf-bd542d5e2931",
      "bc756313-1354-4627-b2a7-9de6e73b4bb7"
    ]
  },
  "bc756313-1354-4627-b2a7-9de6e73b4bb7": {
    "transforms": {
      "d4dc7bbc-226f-444b-a68d-9024c0fcd34d": {
        "author": "[%_client#repr%]",
        "description": "[%source#body%]",
        "title": "[%source#title%]"
      }
    },
    "edges": [
      "d4dc7bbc-226f-444b-a68d-9024c0fcd34d"
    ]
  }
}

FYI

The easiest way to create these graphs programmatically if they become complicated or unwieldy to model is to sign into bipio and mount your local install. After creating your bip visually, grab which JSON parts you need from the Data View in the bip's config for insertion into your own application logic :

Request/Response Example

Request

POST /rest/bip

{
  "domain_id": "5129117f-ed18-9949-7bb1-0000046dacc2",
  "type": "smtp",
  "config": [        
  ],
  "hub": {
    "source": {
      "edges": [
        "d8c35967-d9f4-427b-9aaf-bd542d5e2931"
      ],
      "transforms": {
        "d8c35967-d9f4-427b-9aaf-bd542d5e2931": {
          "subject": "[%source#subject%]",
          "body_html": "[%source#body_html%]",
          "body_text": "[%source#body_text%]",
          "reply_to": "[%source#reply_to%]"
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "icon": "",
  "note": "",
  "end_life": {
      "action": "delete",
      "time": 0,
      "imp": 0
  },
  "paused": false
}

Response

{
  "id": "a9278740-9837-4fe9-b968-2a0778d54a84",
  "name": "JA4CfS7",
  "domain_id": "5129117f-ed18-9949-7bb1-0000046dacc2",
  "type": "smtp",
  "config": [        
  ],
  "hub": {
    "source": {
      "edges": [
        "d8c35967-d9f4-427b-9aaf-bd542d5e2931"
      ],
      "transforms": {
        "d8c35967-d9f4-427b-9aaf-bd542d5e2931": {
          "subject": "[%source#subject%]",
          "body_html": "[%source#body_html%]",
          "body_text": "[%source#body_text%]",
          "reply_to": "[%source#reply_to%]"
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "icon": "",
  "note": "",
  "end_life": {
      "action": "delete",
      "time": 0,
      "imp": 0
  },
  "paused": false,
  "_repr": "JA4CfS7@admin.bipio.local",
  "binder": [        
  ],
  "app_id": "",
  "created": "1386306162162",
  "_imp_actual": 0,
  "_href": "http://bipio.local:5000/rest/bip/a9278740-9837-4fe9-b968-2a0778d54a84"
}