Making the Clickatell gem do your bidding

For a project which will be released to the public next weekend and should start appearing on blogs in the next week (and which could be _huge_), we needed the Clickatell gem from Luke Redpath to pass some other parameters to Clickatell to handle our custom sender ID and callback options. I’m not quite sure why, but the original gem filters out all but two of the configuration options you can pass it.

Fortunately, thanks to Ruby we could work around it with a nasty monkeypatch- namely, overriding the method in it’s entirety in environment.rb:

# Monkeypatch for Clickatell gem to allow callback param
module Clickatell
  class API
    def send_message(recipient, message_text, opts={})
      response = execute_command('sendmsg', 'http',
        {:to => recipient, :text => message_text}.merge(opts)
      )
      parse_response(response)['ID']
    end
  end
end

Not pretty, but it does the job. You can now pass in all the options you need:

api.send_message(mobile_number, content, :from => 'SenderID', :callback => 3)

Again, entirely confused as to why the gem filters all options out. I’ll prod Luke Redpath and see if there’s some reason to it, and if there’s not perhaps this can get fixed to avoid the monkeypatching.

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