Feature Request: batch message sending

[dec0dOS]

Within the given delay (batching_delay) aggregate messages before sending. After that delay join the messages with batching_separator and send them as one message.

Implementation example could be found here:
https://github.com/ivanmarban/winston-telegram
https://github.com/ivanmarban/winston-telegram/blob/6d903eb0db39c2205f548e20ee14fca1e3667022/lib/winston-telegram.js#L84

Pros

Instead of running into the Telegram rate limit with many small messages, one big message could be sent.

[WaffleLapkin]

I'm not really sure if that's useful. Most of the bots I've seen, usually send a single message to a chat at a time, so there is simply nothing to batch. Moreover when you merge messages together you have a chance of exceeding the character limit, so you'll also need to handle that. Also if the messages have some other different parameters (replies, parse mode, etc) then they can't be merged either.

So to me it seems this would be useful in a very small number of cases, and even then probably will cause more trouble than good. Do you have a use-case for this feature?

[dec0dOS]

We use teloxide mostly for our infrastructure monitoring (so only sending messages to user, but not processing the messages sent by user). We have some peak times when we need some attention from our team. Message sending limits in groups are really strict. So we have a big message queue, so throttle adaptor does not solve the problem.

Batching the messages also solves the notification problem - only one notification is sent, instead of spamming with the messages.

By the way, thanks for the awesome project!

[WaffleLapkin]

Oh, I see! Yeah, for single-group notification batching like so makes a lot of sense (I also have a bot like this lmao).

I think, this can be implemented as a bot adaptor that specifically handles SendMessage requests, batching them. Something alike throttle, but a lot simpler.

Would you be down to implementing this? I can provide mentor-ship :)

[dec0dOS]

I'm a pretty novice in Rust, so I would be grateful for the mentor-ship :)

[dec0dOS]

Seems to be the code of the throttle module is still in the teloxide-core repo, but in README there is info that the teloxide-core isn't used anymore.

I should fork the teloxide-core and the teloxide as well?

[WaffleLapkin]

You should switch to the dev branch of this repo, it contains the teloxide-core source code.

[dec0dOS]

If I understand correctly, most of the throttle functionality should be used in the batcher adaptor. Should the throttle be decomposed to use the same functionality in the batcher adaptor?

[WaffleLapkin]

I don't think that we can make a single abstraction that can be used by both throttle and batcher. While they share some things, they differ a lot in details.