CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubytwilio
tverghis
tverghis

Reputation: 999

Twilio: Receive SMS and Do Something With Body Content

I'm having a tough time understanding Twilio. I've read the docs, and plan to read them again, but I was hoping for some pointers. I am using Ruby on Rails for my application.

What I want to do is to be able to receive a text message from a user with some body text. Then, I want to be able to save that text in my model some how. How do I go about doing this?

Thank you!

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2035

Answers (4)

dpigera
dpigera

Reputation: 3369

If you're using Node Express, here's a snippet that worked for me:

app.post('/respondToMessage', function(req, res) {
    var twiml = new twilio.TwimlResponse();
    console.log('sms message =', req.body.Body);
    twiml.message('respondToMessage');
    res.type('text/xml');
    res.send(twiml.toString());
});

You're parsing for the JSON attribute Body from a response that usually looks like this:

{
   "ToCountry": "",
   "ToState": "",
   "SmsMessageSid": "",
   "NumMedia": "",
   "ToCity": "",
   "FromZip": "",
   "SmsSid": "",
   "FromState": "",
   "SmsStatus": "",
   "FromCity": "",
   "Body": "The attribute you're parsing for",
   "FromCountry": "",
   "To": "",
   "MessagingServiceSid": "",
   "ToZip": "",
   "NumSegments": "",
   "MessageSid": "",
   "AccountSid": "",
   "From": "+",
   "ApiVersion": ""
}

Upvotes: 0

azdonald
azdonald

Reputation: 336

You can get the body of an sms message just like you would get the content from a textbox in a web application. In python, it would be

mybody = request.args.get('body')

Upvotes: 0

cheshireoctopus
cheshireoctopus

Reputation: 1790

user2515526,

Recently I set up my first Rails app that draws upon some Twilio Functionality - primarily that of receiving, processing, and responding to SMS messages - and I agree: from a noob's perspective, the Twillio documentation can definitely be cleared up ^^.

I found this git repo to be extremely helpful. The guy essentially walks you through pretty much all you need to know to get up and running.

Upvotes: 1

pdobb
pdobb

Reputation: 18037

The Twilio number can be associated with a callback URL which it will send a POST request to when it receives an SMS. This callback URL should be customized to point to a controller in your app that you will use for processing SMS. From there, you can just read the params hash for details of the SMS message received. Of note: params['From'] and params['Body']. Store the text from those params into any model you like!

Twilio Callback URL

http<s>://<your domain.com>/sms

Route

resource :sms, only: :create

Controller

class SmsController < ApplicationController
  skip_before_filter :force_ssl # You may need this if your app uses https normally

  def create
    # Do something with params['From'] -- contains the phone number the SMS came from
    # Do something with params['Body'] -- contains the text sent in the SMS

    # <Reponse/> is the minimum to indicate a "no response" from Twilio
    render xml: "<Response/>"
  end
end

Upvotes: 5

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