How to implement a Telegram bot program that could handle multiple steps of input?

Question

I'm programming a telegram bot in Python3 using the Telegram bot API. I'm facing the problem of handling requests that need multiple steps to couplet. For example, for an airline search bot:

1. the bot ask for departure city,
2. the user input a name,
3. the bot ask for destination,
4. the user input another name,
5. after a bunch of questions, the bot returns the result to the user.

What can I do?

Answer 1

You need to have a question tree that users can traverse it (you can use a linked list for it and save this tree to the database).

For each question, there is a method that takes some actions (like storing some data in the database) and sends a question/result to the user. Each user has a CurrentState that contain state of the user in the question tree. The user sent an answer to and the bot will run corresponding method and responds to the user.

method = //Fetch user CurrentState from db e.g. airlineBot.doSomething
method(TelegramMessage)