RapidSMS XForms 0.3.2 Released

by Nicolas Pottier

Although we've been improving our XForms app for RapidSMS regularly, we recently made some further enhancements at UNICEF's request that make it deserve a new release.  So without further ado, let me present XForms 0.3.2.

The changes made include:

  1. you can now configure which character needs to lead keywords.  By default this is an empty string, but you can set it to a '+' or '-' to ignore all messages which do not include it.
  2. you can now configure which character needs to lead commands.  By default this is the '+' character, but you may change it to '-' or nothing at all.
  3. you can now pick which character (in addition to spaces) can be used to split and group values.  By default fields are separated by spaces when no command arguments are used, but you can change this to be ',', ';', ':' or '*'.  Note that we decided not to support splitting on '.' as it introduced too much ambiguity when trying to parse decimal values.
  4. some significant work has been done to make parsing more tolerant of errors or mistypes.  Specifically, keyword matching now uses edit distance to try to account for typos.  We have also made the parsing of commands and separators a bit more tolerant, though it obviously does not work in all cases.
  5. you can easily add new custom field types, with their own parsing.  This can allow you to create a new field type such as 'age' and have it parse items such as '6mos' or '1y', putting the result in a numeric field representing the number of days.
  6. we've added templating support for the responses.  You can refer to variables which were parsed by their command and the templating syntax is the same as Django's.  IE, you can do something like: "Thanks {{ name }}, your report is confirmed."

We've also beefed up our unit tests even further, demonstrating all the above features, so you should look there for examples dealing with code.  The unit tests demonstrate both creation of custom fields and custom handlers.  You can also check the documentation for further help.

You can find the 0.3.2  release in PyPi or the latest code on GitHub.  We recommend using the PyPi version unless you need something specific on tip.  We had some bugs in our packaging earlier that made that more difficult but they should be resolved now.  Our thanks go to UNICEF for allowing us to continue working on this fun project.