Here we keep track of possible improvements or new features that need to be fleshed out.
- Commands are not interactive
- We may add the possibility to get the participant list from the list of group members
The command syntax is easy but some expect arguments and Telegram has this unintuitive behavior where a command is immediately sent (without arguments) if you click on it.
To improve on this we would need an interactive version of commands for all commands that accept an input: instead of returning an error, these commands would ask for more input interactively.
Usefulness: not really necessary for expert users, but it would make the bot more user-friendly for beginners.
- add interactive mode to delete expense
- add interactive mode to list expenses
- add interactive mode to register expense
- add all other interactive modes
Less easy than it looks, the bot API cannot be used to retrieve a list of group members (but it can tell you the number of participants in a group).
We can use the Telegram API instead, which is linked to a specific account but can be used by bots too. This API is based on a custom RPC protocol, not something you want to mess with manually...
In Rust the best implementation is given by grammers. An example:
https://github.com/Lonami/grammers/blob/master/lib/grammers-client/examples/echo.rs. For this
purpose is probably sufficient.
Usefulness: I think it could be mainly useful for large groups; for small groups, participants can be quickly registered at the beginning and you don't need to worry about this again. Also, the auto register mode greatly reduces the need for this feature.