Reply Keyboards

Intro

Sometimes it might be nice to get user input via predefined options. This is where a reply keyboard comes in handy. Reply keyboards allow you to show a keyboard with a set of buttons that perform different actions. Let's go into what some of those actions are.

Reply Keyboards

Tourmaline comes with a built in class called Model::ReplyKeyboardMarkup. Any message can be sent with a ReplyKeyboardMarkup instance attached to attach a keyboard to the message. Here's a simple example:

REPLY_MARKUP = Tourmaline::Model::ReplyKeyboardMarkup.new([
  [Tourmaline::Model::KeyboardButton.new("/kitty")],
  [Tourmaline::Model::KeyboardButton.new("/kittygif")],
])

@[Command(["start", "help"])]
def help_command(message, params)
  message.chat.send_message("😺 Use commands: /kitty and /kittygif", reply_markup: REPLY_MARKUP)
end

You should end up with a keyboard that looks like this:

The Markup Module

As you may have noticed, the keyboard creation process is pretty verbose. Luckily there is a module to help you out. The Markup module includes a number of keyboard related convenience methods. Let's modify the previous code block using Markup instead.

REPLY_MARKUP = Markup.buttons([
  ["/kitty"], ["/kittygif"],
]).keyboard

@[Command(["start", "help"])]
def help_command(message, params)
  message.chat.send_message("😺 Use commands: /kitty and /kittygif", reply_markup: REPLY_MARKUP)
end

You can check out the documentation for the Markup module for more information.

Inline Keyboards

Telegram also allows the creation of inline keyboards. Inline keyboards, as the name states, are displayed inline right below the message they're attached to, rather than being attached below the message area. Let's try to do the same thing as before, but with an inline keyboard.

class KittyBot < Tourmaline::Client
  REPLY_MARKUP = Markup.inline_buttons([
    Markup.callback_button("pic", "pic")
    Markup.callback_button("gif", "gif"),
  ]).inline_keyboard

  @[Command(["start", "help"])]
  def help_command(message, params)
    message.chat.send_message("😺 Choose an option below", reply_markup: REPLY_MARKUP)
  end

  @[OnCallbackQuery]
  def kitty_command(ctx)
    # The time hack is to get around Telegram's image cache
    api = API_URL + "?time=#{Time.utc.to_unix}&format=src&type="

    ctx.chat.send_chat_action(:upload_photo)
    case ctx.data
    when "pic"
      ctx.respond_with_photo(api + "jpg")
    when "gif"
      ctx.respond_with_document(api + "gif")
    end
  end
end

With that code you should end up with this: