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I'm building a Telegram bot that uses ConversationHandler to prompt the user for a few parameters and settings about how the bot should behave. This information is stored in some global variables since it needs to be available and editable by different functions inside the program. Every global variable is a dictionary in which each user is associated with its own value. Here's an example:

language = {123456: 'English', 789012: 'Italian'}

where 123456 and 789012 are user ids obtained from update.message.from_user.id inside each function.

After all the required information has been received and stored, the bot should send a message containing a text fetched from a web page; the text on the web page is constantly refreshed, so I want the message to be edited every 60 seconds and updated with the new text, until the user sends the command /stop.

The first solution that came to my mind in order to achieve this was something like

info_message = bot.sendMessage(update.message.chat_id, text = "This message will be updated...")
...
def update_message(bot, update):
    while True:
        url = "http://example.com/etc/" + language[update.message.from_user.id]
        result = requests.get(url).content
        bot.editMessageText(result, chat_id = update.message.chat_id, message_id = info_message.message_id)
        time.sleep(60)

Of course that wouldn't work at all, and it is a really bad idea. I found out that the JobQueue extension would be what I need. However, there is something I can't figure out.

With JobQueue I would have to set up a callback function for my job. In my case, the function would be

def update_message(bot, job):
    url = "http://example.com/etc/" + language[update.message.from_user.id]
    result = requests.get(url).content
    bot.editMessageText(result, chat_id = update.message.chat_id, message_id = info_message.message_id)

and it would be called every 60 seconds. However this wouldn't work either. Indeed, the update parameter is needed inside the function in order to fetch the page according to the user settings and to send the message to the correct chat_id. I'd need to pass that parameter to the function along with bot, job, but that doesn't seem to be possible.

Otherwise I would have to make update a global variable, but I thought there must be a better solution. Any thoughts? Thanks.

user2747949
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1 Answers1

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I had the same issue. A little digging into the docs revealed that you can pass job objects a context parameter which can then be accessed by the callback function as job.context.

context (Optional[object]) – Additional data needed for the callback function. Can be accessed through job.context in the callback. Defaults to None

global language
language = {123456: 'English', 789012: 'Italian'}
j=updater.job_queue

context={"chat_id":456754, "from_user_id":123456, "message_id":111213}

update_job = job(update_message, 60, repeat=True, context=context)
j.put(update_job, next_t=0.0)

def update_message(bot, job):
    global language
    context=job.context
    url = "http://example.com/etc/" + language[context["from_user_id"]]
    result = requests.get(url).content
    bot.editMessageText(result,
                    chat_id = context["chat_id"],
                    message_id = context["message_id"])
George knife
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