Hey Google, I want to buy holy water!

In the previous post I have described about the beginning of my journey with my smarthome. In this post I’ll take a step further, and I will walk you through, how I automated ordering groceris from the finnish k-ruoka online store.

K-Citymarket is just like any other only grocery shop. You can browse withing stores, products, place an order, and get them by home delivery. It’s not just like that, it works exactly like any other webshop. In the previous blogpost in my smarthome series, I have been talking about Google’s home assistant. Just like in that one, this will inlucde Google Assitant too!

The problem

Managing shoppping lists was also hard for me, for several reasons, but mostly, I either forgot to add items to it, or forgot to take the list with me, or if the list was on my phone, I simply forgot to check it, so I always ended back at home with something missing. So i wanted to automate the process. Google Assistant can handle lists, but I saw zero difference, by Google adding the products, or me writing it in a note on my phone. The end result would not have changed: me forgetting something.

So I came up with the idea, let’s automate the entire process. Let’s have Google adding lists to my custom shopping list, and also, when I tell him to, place the order, send the email notification, and get it in motion, which will end with getting the prdducts ordered straight from K-Ruoka.

The beginning

First thing first, I needed to figure out whether K-Ruoka has an open API, to handle all these things, I wanted to automate. Not suprisingly, they didn’t have. I even contacted them on Twitter, they promised to get back to me, but they eventually never did.

So there was nothing else here really to do, but to figure out how does their online shop works, by reverse engineering and hoping for the best, that there are something I can use to go forward.

And guess what? There was.

The idea

So, let’s see the basics, from the very beginning, what I want to achieve here:

1. send commands to Google assistant, to add specific products to my shopping list
2. place orders
3. get confirmation

Researching

This sounds pretty simple, so first I needed to figure out how K-Ruoka handles it’s product. This is a pretty basic method of reverse engineering, I just opened their website, and started browsing items, and added them to the basket.

Simply collecting items, and adding them to the basket, by pressing the + sign.

And, of course, while doing this, I needed to observe the debugger’s network tab in the browser, to see what kind of requests the frontend sends to their backend, if there’s any.

It was pretty easy to spot out, after pressing the + button that the frontend actually sends some requests to the backend.

So I have started investigating this request. By going further, and checking the actual URL there’s a few things we can understand immediately:

So this is a PUT request, and the URL looks like the following:

https://www.k-ruoka.fi/kr-api/order-drafts/ 138e6952-25b3-4242-9851-8f229535f47b/ update?storeId=N106&clientUpdatedPSD2=1

Let’s take a closer look what we have here, which seems to be important:

order-drafs

This definitely handles our basket.

138e6952-25b3-4242-9851-8f229535f47b

This must be our basket id, which looks like a uuid.

update, means we are updating our basket.

storeId=N106 our chosen store, for example Espoo, Iso Omena

Well, this looks pretty easy, let’s save it for later, but it seems I am able to pragmatically add products to my basket.

Let’s observe now the payload of this request:

Well this is pretty straightforward, this is an Array of products.

So what I need to do here agin?

Being able to add procuts, to a basket, pragmatically, (by calling some custom API)

Implementation

To figure out how to do this, i needed to figure out how to get a productId, of a product, I want to add.

This is again, just some very basics of reverse engineering. I did the same thing again, started to use their own search, to look for different products, and observe the requests.

I just permormed a simple search, looking for suklaa (🇬🇧 chocolate),

and observing the network tab:

And as I expected, there’s some request to the backend, which handles the search request.

Let’s see also it’s playload:

The usual stuff, including the storeId, which is important in our case.

Let’s see it’s response:

Woahh! This looks like something we actually needs.

This is how one product’s object looks like. We can also obtain the ID of the product, as well as localized names, which well be especially important for us, since I want to tell the product name to Google Assistant to add it to the shopping list.

Turns out, the localized names are not just the names it also includes quantity, and some types so at this part, to proeed, I needed to think a bit:

english: "Fazer dark chocolate 200g" finnish: "Fazer Tumma suklaa suklaalevy 200g" swedish: "Fazer mörkchoklad 200g dark choco"

Of course, I don’t want to say something like:

Hey Google, add _1 Fazer dark chocolate 200g to my shopping list

First of all, who remembers that, and I had some concerns Google will actually understand that, yet alone, find it’s productId, even with the `API.

Then my thinking went back to the original prolem. I want to automate the grocery shopping. We are usually buying the same stuff:

1. bread
2. eggs
3. drinks
4. vegetables
5. ketchup, mustard, etc
6. …

So, here I needed to come up with something, to make the process easier. I want to buy ketchup. We have the brand chosen, so it’s just ketchup, and not: Felix Ketchup ilman lisättyä sokeria 970g

So eventually, I came up with a middlware solution:

• store the products in a self-owned database
• store the shopping lists in a self-owned database

Where I can add K-Ruoka products, with their own ID, and some customName what will be easier to understand by the Google Assistant.

So I have created a server, using nodeJS and express, implemented a wrapper aroound their official search API, created a schema for storing products:

const productSchema = new Schema({ productId: String, productName: String, customProductName: String, })

Everything is super self explanatory, the productId is their own Id, that represents a product, the productName is the localized name of the product, and the customProductName is who I will refer to this specific product.

The idea was the following:

Hey Google, I want to buy ketchnp!

Where Google calls an API, passes the spoken argument, which is the customProductName (ketchup), finds the K-Ruoka productId, and adds it to my custom shopping list, which by the way has the following Schema:

const ShoppingList = new Schema({ createdAt: String, isFullFilled: Boolean, id: String, items: [{ type: mongoose.Schema.Types.ObjectId, ref: 'Product' }] })

To make my, and Google’s life eaier, I will always have 1 open shopping list, and I control that with a simple Boolean, on the isFullFilled property. I have a guard in my own API which will return 500 if there’s no open shoppping list, saying, I need to create one first. This is just my own preferneces, really, either I need to delete an open shopping list, of place the order, so I am not gonna get all messed up, with different shopping lists.

ShoppingModel.getLastUnFullfilledShoppingListId() .then(result => { if (result === null) { const unFullFilled = { isSuccess: false, reason: 'No shopping list found, you need to create one first' } res.status(500).send(unFullFilled) ...

Of course, to achieve all this, I needed to have some UI, where I can search for K-Ruoka products, and add them with my customName to my own database.

Custom UI

For the search API, I have creaed a wrapper function again, using axios, which cancallable requests, so I can type and wait for the response:

export const makeRequestCreator = (): any => { let source: any; return (apiEndpoint: string, params: any) => { if (source) { source.cancel(); } source = axios.CancelToken.source(); return new Promise((resolve, reject) => { axios(apiEndpoint, { method: "POST", cancelToken: source.token, data: params, }) .then((response) => resolve(response.data)) .catch((error) => reject(error)); }); }; };

Now I have the same results as I were searcing on the K-Ruoka website. I have the product object, including the ID, the localized productName, and so on. Need to add the item with the desired customName:

It’s a super simple UI ,but does the job. When I hit the Add this product button, this K-Ruoka product goes into my own mongodb database.

Now, there’s the next step. Create the API that will be called by Google, with the desired customProductName, and adds it to our custom productList.

This part was actually simple. Just needed to create a custom Google Asssistant service, that listens to a specific command, and call’s some API with some payload.

Hey Google, add # to my shopping list.

Where # is the item, I wish ot add.

Turns out, even though this supposed to be simple, it’s impossible to mke Google forget it’s own lists. So, I was not able took any webhook request, the the sentence add, product, shopping, list, grocery, etc. By not being able to hijack the builtin in list handling, I just ended up some lists in my Google account, named shopping lits, with items, on it like:

1. ketchup
2. bread
3. egg
4. …

Well, this is definitely nbot what I want to achieve here, so I just needed to come up with an expression, Google doesn’t try to iterpret as it’s own list handling commands.

After trying out a bunch, I actually ended up with:

Hé, Googlee! I need to buy #

Need to buy sounds a bit low-level english, but I guess it will do the job, simply, easy to remember, relatively correct, becasue if I am using this command, that menas I actually need to buy that item in question.

IFTTT

So by being able to say something to the Google Assistant, that doesn’t want to do anything with my lists added to my Google account, I could continue, with figurig out, how to make Google Assistant to make an API call, once they processed. After a few searches in Google, Turns out there’s a few approaches out there, including using Google Assistant’s SDK, Raspberry PI, etc. These all seeemed pretty complicated to me, just to build an other serivce, that can call an other service.

Nah, there has to be something else. And there was! I found IFTTT, which provides a bunch of extremely handy processes.

IFTTT stands for: If This Then That, and it’s as easy as it sounds. You can create some logic, by chaining commands together, publish it and then you are ready to use immediately.

This is the simple worklow I created in a service using IFTTT:

So where are we now?

1. I am able to search withing K-Ruoka products, and them with a customName property, into my own mongoDB.
2. I am able to tell Google Assistant what I need to buy and to call an API, with that specific item.
3. I have the desired product in my mongoDB in a shoppingList schema, where the items are stored in an Array.

The database of the shoppingList at the moment looks like the following:

We have an id that identifies the shopping list itself, and the array with the product. Right now, there are 2 different items in the list, both referenced by their ObjectID from my own Products collection.

Let’s get back to the basketID

I have mentioend it ealier, that if I add some product on K-Ruoka’s frontend, there’s a PUT request sent to the backend, with the item, and with a uuid of a basket.

Once again, the buskedId looked like the following:

138e6952-25b3-4242-9851-8f229535f47b

By first blink, this looks like an uuid.

At this point I needed to figure out how can I add to a basket without using their frontend. So, by simply generating my own uuid, using for exampe the uuid npm package.

After generaint an uuid I was calling their draft API with a copied payload from the request:

uuid: b0d2eb8c-9408-4638-a1d8-788f7b7e3b3c

payload:

[ { "type":"ITEM", "id":"6407800009938", "ean":"6407800009938", "amountInfo":{"amount":2,"unit":"kpl"}, "allowSubstitutes":true } ]

And the response was the following:

{ "message": "Draft was gone before updating" }

Well, that’s a problem. Seems like, they are creating, and then validating these buskedIds, on their own way. I needed to figure out where, and how this specific pieice of string is created, that represents a basket.

By opening an inconito window, with the console, then opening k-ruoka.fi, I was not able to catch any request, that creates and returns this.

For a while there was no success at all, but it has to come from somewhere, since it’s part of the request, and it made me think, its not part of some middleware on the backend.

And then, I found this:

It returns an HTML, but it seems like they are storgint the entire applicatino state in a div’s data-state attribute. Weird solution, but luckily, this is exactly what I need.

So I just needed a node-html-parser call this endpoint, get the data-state attribute, parse it into JSON and get the draftId property. Simple as that:

exports.createbasket = () => new Promise((resolve, reject) => { fetch(`${kRuokaApi.createbasket}`, { method: 'GET', headers: {'Content-Type': 'text/html'}, }).then(html => html.text()).then(htmlResponse => { const html = parse(htmlResponse) const applicationState = html.querySelector('#applicationState').getAttribute('data-state') resolve({ isSuccess: true, basketId: JSON.parse(applicationState).page.state.orderDraft.draft.draftId, }) }) })

I wrapped it into an endpoint in my own nodeJS server, and now, by calling that, voilá:

{ "isSuccess": true, "basketId": "78cd610f-2867-468c-a592-806c5c68a86b" }

I have a buskedId. I changed the terminology from draft to basket that’s more straightforward for me.

And now, by using this basketId, i am able to add items pragmatically using the itesm stored in my own shoppingList collection:

And while this is great, there’s some things to keep in mind.

For example we don’t know how long these basketIds are valid, also we don’t know what type of validation they run against the items being inserted to the basket. So instead of keep adding items to the basket, let’s create it and add all the items being placed in my own shoppingList when I am ready to place the order.

And thats should be fairly easy, since we have now everything:

1. the Products in the shopping list, which has their K-Ruoka productId as reference,
2. I can create new basket,
3. and I have an API that returns everything about a product.

This last, 3rd point needs some explanation.

Dealing with products

noticed, when I am clicking on a specific prouct on their website, there’s a request:

And this returns every piece of data, that represents a Product:

It’s safe to assume I will need all these, when placing the order, since it’s also part of the object the frontend sends to the backend, when adding an item to the basket.

I don’t want to store this in my own database, for 2 reasons:

1. useless for my purposes
2. what if some of the properties has changed between the time I have added to my basket, and the time my order is being placed.

To avoid that, I will create the basket, and add all the items the moment I tell my google assistant, to place the order.

So in my MongoDB there is an Array of items, where the some of the details are present.

Again:

const productSchema = new Schema({ productId: String, productName: String, customProductName: String, })

So, to get details of a product using K-Ruoka API, I need a property called urlSlug. It was present in the result when I was searching for a specific item, using their own search API.

I thought, I will save this into my Product alongside with the productId and the customProductName that I am assignignt to every product.

const productSchema = new Schema({ productId: String, productName: String, customProductName: String, urlSchema: String })

So by using the urlSchema property, I can get every item’s data, when creating the payload for the order itsself. I just need to loop through the items Array in my shoppinglist, and call the API mentioned above, with the urlSlug:

exports.getKRuokaProductByUrlSlug = productsArray => new Promise((resolve) => { const promiseArray = [] const resultArray = [] for (let i = 0; i<productsArray.length; i++) { promiseArray.push(new Promise((resolve) => { fetch( `${kRuokaApi.getProductByUrlSlug}/ ${productsArray[i].urlSlug}-n106 ?storeId=N106&languageId=fi` ) .then(productResponse => productResponse.json()).then( json => { resultArray.push(json) resolve(resultArray) }) })) } Promise.all(promiseArray).then((result) => { resolve({ isSuccess: true, result: result[0], }) }) })

I am creating a Promise in every iteration, making sure every request returns the data, and then resolving them all with the resultArray when every Promise had been fullfilled.

This is how the shopping list looks like at the moment:

It has 2 different items, so I need to call their API 3 times, with the 3 urlSlug to get the following resultArray:

There, there are 2 objects in the array. I kept them closed, as there are a lot of stuff in them, and we saw previously how does one response of tha request looks like.

There’s not much left to do, just to create a valid payload of placing an order. There’s really not any other way to reverse engineer this, except the most obviosus one: I needed to order things, in order to figure out how does it works.

This wasn’t a piece of cake, so let’s get into it.

End of Part I

This is not the end of the journey of automating the groceries. I stillll need to palce the order with the very minimum interaction needed from me. If you are interesting, check back here every now and then, or follow me on https://twitter.com/zilahy