TrustyBot - Part 1: Documentation!

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Welcome back to another post! Today I am starting another blog post series in which I detail the process I took in creating my own discord bot TrustyBot.

The idea to start my own bot came from working on another bot from a server I'm in, you can read about how I made my first command and how it inspired me to start work on my own bot here.

What is Discord .NET?

Discord .NET is a library which makes use of the TAP(Task-based Asynchronous Pattern), Interfaces and Polymorphism. I am using this library to make my Discord bot.

Documentation

After getting my hands a little dirty with the other Discord bot, I thought it was time enough to check out the Discord .NET documentation on how to create a bot of my own. You can check it out for yourself here.

Discord has a really well written documentation and I was able to follow it with no problem and I had my own bot up in less than a few minuets. Granted, there was nothing this bot could do, but nevertheless, the bot lived.

Some more reading through the documentation lead me to start reading about commands. There are 2 different types of commands that discord supports, one where users prefix their command in a message that the bot will read, something like !tell-joke, where this command tell-joke is prefixed by a !, and also slash commands, where users prefix a command with a /, and won't appear as a message in the channel.

Slash commands are semi-new to Discord and I haven't seen much of them used in the servers I'm in, so I wanted to try it out for this bot.

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Slash Commands

Thanks to the documentation, it was fairly easy to start building my own slash commands. There is a class called the SlashCommandBuilder which I can create instances of and modify using options provided by the class. Once I've got the options I want, I can then build the command. I'm not entirely sure how 'build' works behind the scene, but I imagine it to be packaging up this slash command and sending it to the bot so it can make use of it.

Here is an example of how I create a slash command:

public JokeCommand() {

Program.Client.SlashCommandExecuted += Handle_SlashCommandExecuted;

SlashCommandBuilder command = new SlashCommandBuilder()
    .WithName(COMMAND_NAME)
    .WithDescription(COMMAND_DESC)
    .AddOption(`user`, ApplicationCommandOptionType.User, `The user you want to tell a joke about`, isRequired: true);

Program.RegisterCommand(command);
}

As you can see, there are some constant variables I am using to define the name and description of each of the commands. There is also the Progarm.RegisterCommand(command); line, this is sending the command back to the program so I can mass 'build' them instead of calling build on each new command I create, I just send it back to the main program to do it.

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Speaking on this subject though, I am trying to figure out a way to do this without having it inside a constructor and creating an instance of each command I want to have in the bot. It looks like this in my main program.

_ = new JokeCommand();

_ = new AdviceCommand();

This is not something I'd like to continue to do so I am thinking of ways to not write a new line creating an instance of a joke when I shouldn't need to do so.

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I don't have any answers right not, but I assure you I will be back to tell you how awesome my solution is when I figure one out, for now I will be signing off this blog post and getting back to work.

Thank you for reading and have a great day! :D