Esendex Ruby SDK

Ruby Gem for interacting with the Esendex API. Full docs for the API can be found at developers.esendex.com.

This is in early stages of development but supports the primary requirements around sending and receiving messages as well as push notifications.

Usage

Setting up

From the command line

gem install esendex

or in your project's Gemfile.

gem 'esendex'

Before sending messages you need to configure the gem with your credentials. In a Rails app this would typically go into a file called esendex.rb in the config/initializers.

Esendex.configure do |config|
  config.username = "<username>"
  config.password = "<password>"
  config.account_reference = "<account_reference>"
end

You can omit account reference and specify it when you instantiate an account object if you're using multiple accounts.

You can also specify these using the environment variables ESENDEX_USERNAME, ESENDEX_PASSWORD and ESENDEX_ACCOUNT.

Sending Messages

First instantiate an Account with the reference. You can omit the reference if you've already configured one to use in the Esendex.configure step. Then, call the send method on the account object with a hash describing the message. The return value is a DispatcherResult which has the batch_id you can use to obtain the status of the messages you have sent.

account = Account.new
result = account.send_message( to: "07777111222", body: "Saying hello to the world with the help of Esendex")

You can specify a different account to the default by passing the reference in as an initialization argument

account = Account.new('EX23847')

Multiple messages are sent by passing an array of Messages to the send_messages method

result = account.send_messages([Message.new("07777111222", "Hello"), Message.new("07777111333", "Hi")])

Sent messages can be retrieved by calling the sent_messages method. The return value is a SentMessagesResult

result = account.sent_messages
puts result
result.messages.each do |message|
  puts message
end

Testing Configuration

The Esendex Gem ships with a couple of rake tasks that allow you to simply validate that all is well.

rake esendex:validate['<username>,'<password>','<account_reference>']

This will confirm that the credentials passed can access the account.

You can also send a message

rake esendex:send_message["<mobile_number>","<message_body>"]

You will need to set the credentials as enviroment variables which can also be done inline

rake esendex:send_message["<mobile_number>","<message_body>"] ESENDEX_USERNAME=<username> ESENDEX_PASSWORD=<password> ESENDEX_ACCOUNT=<account_reference>

Push Notifications

You can configure your Esendex account to send Push Notifications when the following occur

• MessageDeliveredEvent
• MessageFailedEvent
• InboundMessage

While it is possible to poll our API to check the status of outbound messages and to check for new inbound messages, the recommended approach is to allow the Esendex Platform to notify your system when these events occur.

To do this you need to setup web accessible end points to accept the notifications. These end points are configured in Esendex Developer Tools.

Classes are provided in the gem for deserialising the notifications: MessageDeliveredEvent, MessageFailedEvent and InboundMessage. They all expose a .from_xml method to support this.

message = InboundMessage.from_xml request.body

Rails 4

In order to simplify receipt of push notifications for Rails users, the gem ships with mountable Rails controllers to handle the receipt of these notifications.

To mount the end points, add this to routes.rb

RailsApp::Application.routes.draw do
  ...
  mount Esendex::Engine => "/esendex"
end

To configure the behaviour in response to a notification, you need to configure a lambda to use.

Esendex.message_delivered_event_handler = lambda { |notification| 
  # process the notification
}

Please be kind to us and don't perform anything potentially long running in this call back as our notifier may timeout the request and pass the notification to the retry queue.

If you need to perform processing that may run for a longer time then using an async task system like Resque is recommended.

All notification classes expose a .to_hash method and can be initialised from the hash for serialisatiion and deserialisation.

For example:

Esendex.inbound_message_handler = lambda { |notification| 
  Resque.enqueue InboundMessageProcessor, notification.to_hash
}

class InboundMessageProcessor

  def self.perform(notification)
    message = Esendex::InboundMessage.new notification
    # do some processing of the message here
  end

end

The handlers are defined as follows:

End Point	Config Setting	Notification Class	Developer Tools
/esendex/inbound_messages	Esendex.inbound_message_handler	InboundMessage	SMS received
/esendex/message_delivered_events	Esendex.message_delivered_event_handler	MessageDeliveredEvent	SMS delivered
/esendex/message_failed_events	Esendex.message_failed_event_handler	MessageFailedEvent	SMS failed

Errors

When an error occur in the handler lambdas then the controller returns a 500 status along with some error information back to the the Esendex Platform. This information is emailed to the technical notifications contact for the account.

The notification then enters the retry cycle.

Included by default is the backtrace for the error to assist you in identifying the issue. You can suppress backtrace with the following config option.

Esendex.configure do |config|
  config.suppress_error_backtrace = true
end

Testing

bundle exec rspec

Will run specs. The spec folder contains a dummy Rails project for testing the Rails Engine.

This project also ships with a Guardfile so you can run tests continuously.

bundle exec guard

Contributing

We really welcome any thoughts or guidance on how this gem could best provide the hooks you need to consume our services in your applicaiton. Please fork and raise pull requests for any features you would like us to add or raise an [issue]((https://github.com/esendex/esendex-ruby-sdk/issues)

Customers with more pressing issues should contact our support teams via the usual local phone number or by email: [email protected].

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2011-18 Esendex Ltd. See licence.txt for further details.