I’m building a Telegram bot with Aiogram and need help implementing a universal back button using ReplyKeyboardButton. My bot has a hierarchical menu structure where the back button should work differently based on the current menu level.
Here’s my setup: The main menu has two options - Teachers and Courses. When users click Teachers, they see three choices: Add Teachers, View Teachers, and Back. When they click Courses, they get Python Course, JavaScript Course, and Back.
The issue is that I want the Back button to always return users to the previous menu level (the main menu with Teachers and Courses), regardless of which submenu they’re currently in.
How can I implement this context-aware back button functionality? I’m not sure how to track the menu hierarchy and make the back button behave correctly for different menu levels.
Just use a simple user_state dict to track where each user came from. Set user_states[user_id] = 'main_menu' when they enter submenus. Your back button handler checks user_states.get(user_id, 'main_menu') and sends them there. Simple and effective - no need for complex classes or stacks.
I encountered a similar issue while developing a chatbot last year. To solve this, I implemented a menu state stack to keep track of the user’s location within the menu. I used session data, specifically a dictionary indexed by user_id, to store the current menu context. When the user navigates to a new level in the menu, I would push the current state onto a stack. When they press the Back button, the last state is popped from the stack and the bot navigates them back to that menu level. For your scenario, you could create a structure like {user_id: [‘main_menu’, ‘teachers’]} to trace their position while in the teachers submenu. When handling the Back button, simply check the last entry in their history. Just be cautious to update the stack appropriately as users navigate forward and to handle cases where they might issue commands instead of pressing buttons, which could disrupt the menu flow.
I built a menu navigation class that handles back button logic in one place. Each menu gets a parent reference - so Teachers submenu has ‘main_menu’ as its parent, same with Courses. When someone hits Back, I just check the current menu in user data and send them to whatever parent is defined. Way simpler than managing stacks manually and fewer bugs too. Two things to watch for: clear any temp data when users go back (especially form inputs), and add a fallback to the main menu if the parent reference breaks somehow.