I recently had my first Amazon Alexa skill published and am eagerly awaiting my Alexa Dev hoodie! Developing and publishing an Alexa skill is a lot easier than you might think especially with all the tutorials and resources Amazon provides. I decided to develop a skill that’ll read the WOD (Workout of the day) from the crossfit gym I go to. The only problem is that my gym’s website didn’t have a public API even though it was running on WordPress. Fortunately it did have an unpublished RSS feed that I was able to find the URL to.
I chose to create my skill using Node.js without having to use any node modules. This was a challenge since I couldn’t read in the RSS feed directly without running into any cross-domain issues. To overcome this I used Yahoo’s YQL to read the RSS feed and return the results via JSON. YQL can read any RSS feed using it’s SQL-like syntax.
select * from rss where url = 'RSS URL'It even provides you with a REST url. Once I had that, the rest was easy.
var https = require('https');
var optionsget = {
host : 'query.yahooapis.com',
port : 443,
path : '/v1/public/yql?q=rssurl&format=json&diagnostics=true&callback=', // the rest of the url with parameters if needed
method : 'GET'
};
function getWod(eventCallback) {
var reqGet = https.request(optionsget, function(res) {
var finalData = "";
res.on('data', function(d) {
finalData += d.toString();
});
res.on("end", function() {
var obj = JSON.parse(finalData);
eventCallback(obj);
});
});
reqGet.end();
reqGet.on('error', function(e) {
console.log("Got error: ", e);
});
}
8 Comments
Looks like a great way to save time (YQL), however I’m running into issues with my node.js syntax – is the code above _exactly_ as it would appear in the Lambda function (aside from the YQL API call)? Here’s one error I got, for instance:
{
“errorMessage”: “Handler ‘handler’ missing on module ‘index'”
}
The code is an exact snippet of the method I use to retrieve the json. The error you’re getting is related to the export function in your code.
I was able to get beyond that error but am getting null values returned from the method. Could you post the whole Lambda function or something similar – having a difficult time wrapping my head around node.js syntax. Thanks.
Here’s a snippet in additional to what is in the post:
exports.handler = function(event, context, callback) {
var alexa = Alexa.handler(event, context);
alexa.APP_ID = APP_ID; //this should be your App ID
alexa.registerHandlers(handlers);
alexa.execute();
};
var handlers = {
'LaunchRequest': function () {
var reprompt = "What can I help you with?";
this.emit(':ask', reprompt, reprompt);
},
'GetNewFactIntent': function () {
this.emit('GetFact');
},
'GetFact': function () {
var t = this;
getWod(function (events) {
if (events.length == 0) {
var speechOutput = "There was a problem retrieving the json. Please try again later.";
t.emit(':tell', speechOutput);
} else {
// Create speech output
var speechOutput = events;
var cardTitle = "Your card title";
t.emit(':tellWithCard', speechOutput, cardTitle, speechOutput);
}
});
},
'AMAZON.CancelIntent': function () {
var speechOutput = "Goodbye";
this.emit(':tell', speechOutput);
},
'AMAZON.StopIntent': function () {
var speechOutput = "Goodbye";
this.emit(':tell', speechOutput);
}
};
Hope that helps you.
On the right track now – thanks for your help.
Hi, I think this is what I want to do, but I don’t understand the code, do you have the full lambda function code please?
I’ll post the source code by tomorrow
Here you go https://gist.github.com/ijason/5eeb42f4e8004bbd8ab3d6f10f14c502