How do I make a quiz?

[smashah]

Lets say you have 3 questions, age range, gender and country:

You can encode the button ID with the quiz state relating to that answer. So let's say we start the quiz by asking the age range with 3 standard quick reply buttons. The buttons will be as follows:

Button #	Button Value	Quiz state	Button ID (Base64 encoded quiz state)
1.	0-15	{"age_range":"0-15"}	eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIwLTE1In0=
2.	16-22	{"age_range":"16-22"}	eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIxNi0yMiJ9
3.	23-40	{"age_range":"23-40"}	eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIyMy00MCJ9

As you can see, the base64 encoded button ID is the end state after answering the question with the relevant answer.

The code will be as follows:

await client.sendButtons(chatId, "What age are you?", [
"id": "eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIwLTE1In0=",
"text" : "0-15"
],[
"id": "eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIxNi0yMiJ9",
"text" : "16-22"
],[
"id": "eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIyMy00MCJ9",
"text" : "23-40"
], "1/3")

Let's assume the user selected the first option "0-15", the next question is gender with three more options.

Button #	Button Value	Quiz state	Button ID (Base64 encoded quiz state)
1.	male	{"age_range":"0-15", "gender": "male"}	eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIwLTE1IiwgImdlbmRlciI6ICJtYWxlIn0=
2.	female	{"age_range":"0-15", "gender": "female"}	eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIwLTE1IiwgImdlbmRlciI6ICJmZW1hbGUifQ==
3.	other	{"age_range":"0-15", "gender": "other"}	eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIwLTE1IiwgImdlbmRlciI6ICJvdGhlciJ9

await client.sendButtons(chatId, "Select gender", [
"id": "eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIwLTE1IiwgImdlbmRlciI6ICJtYWxlIn0=",
"text" : "male"
],[
"id": "eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIwLTE1IiwgImdlbmRlciI6ICJmZW1hbGUifQ==",
"text" : "female"
],[
"id": "eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIwLTE1IiwgImdlbmRlciI6ICJvdGhlciJ9",
"text" : "other"
], "2/3")

The base64 buttons IDs are naturally longer because the quizstate object has more data. Assuming the user selected 1, the button ID of the response will be eyJhZ2VfcmFuZ2UiOiIwLTE1IiwgImdlbmRlciI6ICJtYWxlIn0=.

Now, onto the last question, country. There are 195 countries in the world. Let's assume our users are in one of 20 countries. You cannot use sendButtons with 20 options. Luckily, you can use sendListMessage instead.

Now we can introduce some quality of life improvements to dynamically generate the required list message.

//this function converts an object to a base 64 string
const b64ify = (obj) => Buffer.from(JSON.stringify(obj)).toString('base64');
const countries = [
	"Afghanistan",
	"Albania",
	"Algeria",
	"American Samoa",
	"Andorra",
	"Angola",
	"Anguilla",
	"Antarctica",
	"Antigua and Barbuda",
	"Argentina",
	"Armenia",
	"Aruba",
	"Australia",
	"Austria",
	"Azerbaijan",
	"Bahamas (the)",
	"Bahrain",
	"Bangladesh",
	"Barbados"
]

await client.sendListMessage(chatId, [
    title: "Countries",
    rows: countries.map(country => ({
        title: country,
        rowId: b64ify({
            ...currentState,
            country
        })
    }))
], "Please select a country", "3/3", "Choose")

And voila, when you get the response for this last list message, you can determine that the quiz has ended (because all properties are answered) and you've done it without integrating a database to save conversation/quiz state and without integrating dialogflow (which is not free at scale nor stateful beyond 5 minutes).

What's next?

Ideally, there should be an inbuilt quiz management which dynamically does the background work for you and uses a message collector type system to emit finalized quizzes for you.

[TBC]

Ref (from discord discussion):

#1794 (comment)

[swatky]

Very nice, this can be used for many things.
I think it's possible to make a "Feedback" of user satisfaction with the Bot, the range of possibilities is very wide, in my opinion.