Grades Dashboard Google Action
Important update:
Google announced on June 13, 2022 that Conversational Actions, the platform that Grades Dashboard is built
upon, will be sunset and no longer available after June 12, 2023. In the meantime, Grades Dashboard will
still function
but, but my development is be halted due to removal of conversation-building tools. While this is
unfortunate for
Grades Dashboard, there are alternative paths that this may take in the future, as Google is transitioning
this functionality to Android applications. However, as you will no longer be able to interact with Grades
Dashboard through
Google Home (the original intention of this project), it is likely that I will focus my efforts on other
projects.
At this point, (unfortunately) the project is no longer available for public use. The source remains
available on GitHub, but I have taken down the configuration web interface and the webhook endpoint as
services from my server.
Thank you for checking out Grades Dashboard, and I hope you come back to see what I'm working on next!
This Action allows you to ask Google Assistant about your grades. It retrieves grade information from Powerschool SIS and displays it as part of a conversation with Google Assistant.
The Action's webhook endpoint is now hosted on my own server. A configuration webpage, (no longer) available at https://dashboard-api-web.sigmondkukla.tk/ makes POST requests to separate routes on my endpoint that control user data, such as creating, editing, and deleting user information.
Through building and deploying this, I learned:
- Using Google Actions Console
- More Python skills:
- Creating a Flask application
- Parsing JSON
- Using Postman to test requests
- Creating a SQLite database
- Using a Gunicorn server
- Server hosting:
- Setting up a personal cloud server
- Multipass containers & network bridging
- Configuring Ubuntu Server
- Using Cloudflare DNS
- Reverse proxy based on hostname with nginx
- Getting SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt
- Web app creation:
- Creating a persistant login system using Flask
- Using Bootstrap for quickly designing multiple pages
- Displaying flash messages as feedback for user's actions
- Sharing database between web app and endpoint
Take a look at the code on GitHub:
- Google Actions webhook endpoint: https://github.com/PicoPlanetDev/dashboard-api
- Configuration web interface: https://github.com/PicoPlanetDev/dashboard-api-web