rapidsms and kannel

[Etnik]

Hello everyone,

I've been keeping a close eye on the board and the progress everyone
is making and I am quite happy to see your results!

My colleague and I are currently attempting to establish a rapidsms
platform to interact with an sms-center and eventually create
something similar to the Nigerian system (here in Kosovo).

At the moment we have established a VPN with an sms-center and we can
successfully send and receive SMS's via url using the Kannel gateway.

We have also successfully installed RapidSMS on our Ubuntu system...

However, after much research and experimentation we are unable to
"link" RapidSMS with the Kannel gateway.

The kannel backend is installed, and this is what our project's
settings.py configuration looks like...

".....

INSTALLED_BACKENDS = {

"ipko": {

"ENGINE": "rapidsms.backends.kannel",
"host": "127.0.0.1",
},

.......
"

When I run the server (python manage.py runrouter) it executes without
error and I am able to see the web interface.

My questions now are:

1. Is RapidSMS the medium for which SMS's are stored in a database
(SQL)?

2. How can I configure RapidSMS to send and receive SMS's?


Any information is gratefully appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
~Etnik K.
UNICEF Innovations Lab Kosovo

[Nchimunya H]

Hi Etnik,
You have to add more information to the rapidsms backends and also to kannel.conf.The kannel backend is installed, and this is what our project's

settings.py configuration looks like...

".....

INSTALLED_BACKENDS = {

"ipko": {

      "ENGINE": "rapidsms.backends.kannel",
      "host": "127.0.0.1",
},

Add these lines:

"mtn" : {

        "ENGINE":  "rapidsms.backends.kannel",
        "host": "127.0.0.1",

        "port": 8082,
        "sendsms_url": "http://127.0.0.1:13013/cgi-bin/sendsms",
        "sendsms_params": {"smsc": "mtn-smsc",
                           "from": "88160", # not set automatically by SMSC
                           "username": "rapidsms",
                           "password": ""}, # set password in localsettings.py or here
        "coding": 0,
        "charset": "ascii",
        "encode_errors": "ignore", # strip out unknown (unicode) characters
    }

And add this to the end of kannel.conf:

group = sms-service
keyword = default
accepted-smsc = mtn-smsc
# don't send a reply here (it'll come through sendsms):
max-messages = 0
get-url = http://127.0.0.1:8081/?id=%p&text=%a&charset=%C&coding=%c

1. Is RapidSMS the medium for which SMS's are stored in a database
(SQL)?

Yes.

I hope this information will help you setup.

--


Kind Regards
Nchimunya Hamakando

skype id : nchimunya4life

[Etnik]

Hi Nchimunya,

I appreciate all the helpful suggestions, as a result I have been able
to successfully execute smsbox with additional paramters and the
RapidSMS server & router without error (I was receiving countless
errors about incorrect parameters before, hence why I only had 1 or 2
params).

My next questions is: Where in the RapidSMS interface does it allow me
to send and receive/store in SQL?

My current interface is very dodgy, for example it does not allow me
to create a contact with his/her phone-number, instead the only
available parameters are Name and Language.
Because of this, I cannot use the "Messaging" tab properly to send
sms.

We are using RapidSMS v0.9.6a-27...


Respectfully,
~Etnik K.

>     get-url =http://127.0.0.1:8081/?id=%p&text=%a&charset=%C&coding=%c

[Nchimunya H]

Hi Etnik,

> My next questions is: Where in the RapidSMS interface does it allow me
> to send and receive/store in SQL?

Rapidsms does not allow you to directly access the database. You may
have to use the django admin if you need to access the database. You can
also use the shell to query the database using django (./manage.py
shell). It's possible to use sql but django can do most of that without
the need for actual sql.
Am not sure if I have answered your question.

> My current interface is very dodgy, for example it does not allow me
> to create a contact with his/her phone-number, instead the only
> available parameters are Name and Language.
> Because of this, I cannot use the "Messaging" tab properly to send
> sms.

I often use the http-tester to create contacts using the built-in
contacts app and to send messages. I think someone has worked on the
Rapidsms messaging tab but I have not tried it.

[David McCann]

Etnik--

If you're wanting to simply keep a database log of all incoming and outgoing messages to the system, you can use the rapidsms.contrib.messagelog application.  During the message routing process, this application adds records to the database, and also attaches a "logger_message" attribute to the IncomingMessage and OutcomingMessage objects that are passed via the router to the various apps.  This would allow you to also attach these Message models as FKs to any of your application's models.

This doesn't, however, interface with Kannel.  You'll stlll need to use HTTP to do all your message brokering with Kannel.

Hope this helps,

--dm

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[Etnik]

Thank you all for your advice, we are currently able to send SMS via
rapidsms messaging interface (http), using suggestions above...

Our next question is in regard to receiving or viewing a text from a
user by means of HTTP GET request.

At the moment our kannel config for receiving texts looks like this:

group = sms-service
keyword-regex = .*
catch-all = yes
max-messages = 0
get-url = "http://localhost/sms?phone=%p&text=%a"

When smsbox & bearerbox is up and running and when we manually try to
access "http://localhost/sms?phone=%p&text=%a" we get a URL error...

Is there some parameters I am missing?
Is there another file I need to add settings to (...rapidsms_project/
settings.py)?
Is there a web-service that needs to be running (other than apache)?

This is the kannel.py we currently have:
https://github.com/rapidsms/rapidsms/blob/master/lib/rapidsms/backends/kannel.py...

Any assistance is appreciated,
~Etnik