Timetable Bot for NTU Beta 0.1.0

A Telegram chatbot that acquires timetable data from NTU's class schedule portal, generates a timetable in app and sends daily reminders.

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Usecase

• Individuals can use it to easily acquire and reference their own timetable, with also the ability to enable reminders to be sent daily.

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Commands

• /start

Starts the bot

• /create

One time registration of your name (single word) so that a database that has your timetable can be initialised. For example: /create Student

• /addmodules

Add your modules to generate the timetable.

Example:

/addmodules

CZ0001 10078

CZ1005 13804

CZ1006 10101

CZ1007 10114

CZ1011 10126

The 5 digit numbers following the module codes are the index numbers that you see on the timetable generated by NTU. They are unique identifiers for your group in the module.

• /today

Sends the timetable and events for today

• /tomorrow

Sends the timetable and events for tomorrow

• /timetable

Sends the timetable for the week

• /reminders

Enables daily reminders of the next day's timetable to be sent. For now it is set at 10:30pm. Next version of the bot will improve upon this.

• /help

Sends the full list of commands available, with examples provided.

Running your own instance

• Obtain bot token from @BotFather on Telegram
• Set up MongoDB cluster
• Host on suitable platform. Current source code is written to be deployed on Heroku. However, as the hosting is free, one gets the reliability and uptime one pays for.

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Future Work

• Make UX more friendly and smooth, by adding in conversation handlers instead of the bot just responding to commands
• Add in customisable reminders, so that users can set time they want the reminders at, and maybe a custom message attached to it.

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Credits

Authors of all libraries / modules used in the inspiration for and development of this bot, in no particular order:

• Python Telegram Bot - the most functional Python wrapper for the telegram bot API.
• PyMongo - PyMongo is objectively the best raw mongo connector for Python, coming with a default connection pool enabled by default.
• MongoDB - mongoDB is used as the database for this bot, with it being noSQL allows for easy information storage.
• SIM-UoW Timetable Bot - Took inspiration from this amazing bot in crafting the functions and presentation for this bot.
• NTU Course Planner - Learnt web scrapping and HTML parsing from reading through and using the code in this application
• Beautiful Soup - With a HTML parser like this, what else do you even need.