Teach Lita How to Query the Meetup API

Your meetup finder skill has two major components: a standard Lita handler layer to connect chat users with the meetup API and a model class for standardizing parsing of the meetup API responses. You’ll start with the Lita handler layer.

Open your meetup_finder.rb implementation and add the required meetup_client gem at the top of the file:

lita-meetup-finder/lib/lita/handlers/meetup_finder.rb
​ ​# Load 3rd party meetup API client gem​
​ require ​'meetup_client'​

Next, you’ll set up a handy convention for wrapping normal exceptions in the course of interacting with a remote API.

Create a custom API error class

API clients tend to fail in predictable ways, such as:

  • Bad or missing API key
  • Unable to connect to ...

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