The Big Send is a an application designed to allow for people to send a large number of text messages to diffrent clients , by imoprting a csv file into the app.
It has merge capibillity, such that if the CSV file has a header, it will take the header and use the header names as refrence for you to embed them into the message. For example if you had the following CSV:
phone,name
12345,Foo
23456,Bar
You could construct personalized messages like a so
Hello {{name}}
This was originally a project for my science fair during 2020, which I was able to win a more minor award in my age group.
It was brought to my attention by someone who wanted to send out a large number of text messages securely and cheaply. The problem for him and his organization was that security had to take precedence over cost, because the contents of these messages was confidential. This lead to him asking for this app to be developed.
Because of the type of application that was being built, I expanded its use case to include club managers and other people who would require such functionality, because I saw that this could be used in these situations.
The Big Send is an application originally written in the Android SDK, but move over to Flutter, for easier design and simpler porting to iOS.
The app has two main screens, a message screen, and a list screen
From the numbers screen the user can choose to import a csv file or from google drive, which is not yet implemented. The user will then be prompted on wether their CSV file has a header, if they answer yes, then it will select the column that contains the phone numbers. If they answer no, it will just import the fist column as phone numbers. It will then import it with the name Untitled x, where x is just the next available name. The user can change the name of the list or delete it altogether. Once the click select, they will taken back to the main screen where they can input a message and click send to launch the messages.
Before building the application, the json parsers need to be built. This can be done one of two ways:
- One time build
flutter pub run build_runner build- In watch mode
flutter pub run build_runner watchAfter this the app can be built normally.