VB.Net Adding items to a Reply Keyboard for Telegram.bot

Question

I am using VB.Net (VS2019) and the Telegram.bot API. In the C# sample, they show how to add items to the replykeyboard. I'm afraid I don't understand the IEnumerable concept at all, but I have managed to translate the C# to working VB.Net code anyway.

This is the code: C#

 if (update.Message.Text.Contains("/reply"))
    {
      var keyboard = new ReplyKeyboardMarkup
      {
       Keyboard = new KeyboardButton[][]{
                  new KeyboardButton[]{
                  new KeyboardButton("Button 1"), //column 1 row 1
                  new KeyboardButton("Button 2") //column 1 row 2
                },// column 1
                  new KeyboardButton[]{
                  new KeyboardButton("Button 3") //col 2 row 1
                } // column 2
       },
       ResizeKeyboard = true
    }; ;
   bot.SendMessage(update.Message.Chat.Id, "new keyboard", replyMarkup: keyboard);
}

The VB Code is

If update.Message.Text.Contains("/reply") Then
    Dim keyboard = New ReplyKeyboardMarkup With {
        .Keyboard = New KeyboardButton()() {New KeyboardButton() {New KeyboardButton("Button 1"), New KeyboardButton("Button 2")}, New KeyboardButton() {New KeyboardButton("Button 3")}},
        .ResizeKeyboard = True
    }
    bot.SendMessage(update.Message.Chat.Id, "new keyboard", replyMarkup:=keyboard)
End If

My question is how I can update that on the fly? I an reading a table from sqlite and I want to create the buttons to hold the rowids of the records.. So I have

 mySQL = "select * from products;"
 Dim cs As String = "URI=file:" & DBName
Using con As New SQLiteConnection(cs)
   con.Open()
   Dim dr As SQLiteDataReader
   Using DBcmd As New SQLiteCommand(con)
       DBcmd.CommandText = mySQL
       dr = DBcmd.ExecuteReader()
       While dr.Read()
           MsgText &= String.Format("Code: *{0}* [{1}]({3}), Price: ${2}", dr("Code"), Replace(dr("ProdName"), "-", " "), dr("Price"), dr("ProdURL")) & vbCrLf
       End While
    End Using
    con.Close()
End Using

In that loop I would like to build the keyboard adding one button for each occurrence of the dr("code") as the text of the button.

Help please?

Answer 1

One option is to create a List(Of KeyboardButton()), i.e. a generic List of KeyboardButton arrays. You can read from your data reader in a loop, create an array of KeyboardButton for the current record and add it to the List. Finally, call ToArray on the List to get a jagged array of KeyboardButton that you can assign to the Keyboard property. E.g.

Dim keyboardButtons As New List(Of KeyboardButton())

While dr.Read()
    keyboard.Add({New KeyboardButton(dr.GetString(dr.GetOrdinal("Code")))})
End While

Dim keyboard As New ReplyKeyboardMarkup With {.Keyboard = keyboardButtons.ToArray()}