About the Project (Use Case)

• SmartSheet bot is used as an interactive SmartSheet creating & filling solution right from Cisco Spark!
• Users do not have to leave their favorite collaboration platform in order to fill surveys, reports, or forms
• Survey response rate may increase form an average of 40 % to more as users will feel like they are interacting with an actual person

Demo Steps

• To begin the process find the bot and send a direct message beginning with your smart sheet API access token using the access_token command followed by the token
• To create a Sheet use Sheet_Name command followed by the name of the sheet
• To Add columns to the Sheet use Add_Col command followed by the title of the columns separated by a comma
• After the sheet is created, In order to enable the Bot get the list of rooms you belong to you would pate your Cisco Spark Access Token when requested
• To begin sharing the sheet with members in a room initiate with Sheet_Share command
• After the list of rooms have been populated respond with a number assigned to the room
• The Direct mention takes place and the User is sent a direct message to confirm availability to fill sheet in a room created by the Bot
• User responds with mention @Smartsheetbot Yes and the bot gets all the Users responses and populates the sheet with a row

Components of the application/code

1. MongoDB is the object oriented database we used to store the sheet ID against the list of shared users in a room. Mongoose is the npm library of mongo DB
2. Reddis allows the bot create a temporary database that allows conversations to persist data of a specific user conversation and handles the temporary storage across conversations between the bot and the sheet Creators/ Editors
3. BotKit Library comes with a majority of all the functions needed
4. SmartSheet Node Package Manager allows us used prebuilt smart sheet functions in Node JS instead of reinventing the wheel.

Installation Steps and Procedures to run the SmartSheet Bot Locally.

• First clone the entire project folder from GitHub
• Before you begin Have at least Node JS 7.0 installed on your computer. It's better to *Install node version manager to install node 7
• Download, install and run a REDDIS instance and point the URL to the variable link
• Download, install and run Mongo DB instance and point the URL to the variable link. You can use MLAB to generate a free instance of the Mongo database
• Open terminal and run npm install to install all the project dependencies
• Create a startup.sh file in the same spark_bot directory and include all the bot tokens and Urls as specified below . This is used to set all the environmental variables needed by assigning the bot tokens and links

export CISCOSPARK_ACCESS_TOKEN= ? //bot access token
export REDIS_URL= ?
export access_token= ? //This is the same as the Spark bot Access token above
export mongoose_db=? //url to mongo DB instance from above
export public_address=? //NGROK URL

• To run the project open terminal within the IDE and run source startup.sh to run all the environmental variables, and use npm start to run the server

Improvement Tasks

• Update and Modify Smart Sheets directly from Cisco Spark
• Sheet Editors / admins should be able to add multiple responses to a sheet in form of rows.

NOTE: For full documentation and examples about the Cisco Spark See the Cisco DevNet Repo