How to work with InlineKeyboardMarkup?

[MLNW]

I would like to use InlineKeyboardMarkup in my bot to implement a configuration menu similar to what is used by the @Botfather for configuring bots.

From the Telegram API docs it sounds to me like I just need to send a message with a reply_markup field set to a JSON array of array of InlineKeyboardButtons.

I tried it with code like this:

keyboard =
  [
    [%{text: "Configure A", callback_data: "a_start"}],
    [%{text: "Configure B", callback_data: "b_start"}]
  ]
  |> Jason.encode!()

Telegram.Api.request(token, "sendMessage",
  text: "Configuration Menu",
  chat_id: chat_id,
  reply_markup: keyboard)

The result is sadly nothing at all. As soon as I add the reply_markup parameter the API call seems to fail silently. I had a similar issue before when trying to send a message with parse_mode: "MarkdownV2" that included a . in the message text.

1. Is there a way to turn on additional logging or is there another way to figure out what is happening when I run this?
2. Do you have an idea what I'm doing wrong?

I'm fairly new to Elixir, so it might just be a stupid mistake on my side.

[visciang]

Hi @MLNW

Have a look here https://visciang.github.io/telegram/readme.html#sendmessage-with-keyboard
Just use the json object "facility" (no need to serialize the object yourself) and use the correct reply_markup object schema (keyboard_markup = %{one_time_keyboard: ..., keyboard: ...})

About errors: we are just send request to the telegram server and you get back a reply from them, just look at the response.
But consider that they will apply the robustness principle, so if you send by mistake extra info that won't give any error.

IE:

iex(5)> Telegram.Api.request(token, "sendMessage", chat_id: 0, text: "text")
{:error, "Bad Request: chat not found"}

iex(6)> Telegram.Api.request(token, "getMe", this_is_an_unknown_parameter: 1)
{:ok, %{...}}

Hope it helps you

[MLNW]

Thank you very much for the quick and great reply. As expected it comes down to mistakes on my part. Somehow I even missed the mention of the keyboard in your docs even though I must have read through it multiple times.

I'll try it out tonight and let you know how it goes.

[MLNW]

Yes, this is exaclty what I was looking for and it works well! Generally, I have gained a better understanding of how your lib works with the Telegram API. Thanks for that!

I'm now going to build a configuration menu around the inline_keyboard.