Synopsis

FormFlow for Microsoft BotBuilder node.js SDK. C# BotBuilder SDK has a cool feature called FormFlow. This feature allows you to generate a Dialog tree for your chatbot in order to get some responses back from the user.

Code Example

You start by specifying a JSON file that will contain the question/answer series for your chatbot. Pay special attention to the ordering, as this is the exact order that the questions will be asked by the bot.

[
    {
        "id": "firstname",
        "prompt": "please enter a name",
        "response": "Your name is %s",
        "errorPrompt": "please enter a string of > 0 characters",
        "type": "text"
    },
    {
        "id": "language",
        "prompt": "please select a language",
        "response": "Your favorite programming language is %s",
        "errorPrompt": "please select one of the choices",
        "type": "choice",
        "choices": "JavaScript|TypeScript|CoffeeScript"
    },
    {
        "id": "email",
        "prompt": "please enter an email",
        "response": "Your email is %s",
        "errorPrompt": "please enter a valid email",
        "type": "email"
    },
    {
        "id": "url",
        "prompt": "please enter a website (starting with http:// or https://)",
        "response": "Your url is %s",
        "errorPrompt": "please enter a valid website",
        "type": "url"
    }
]

You need to specify

• id: that is the name of the field you want to get filled by the user
• prompt: the question to be asked to the user
• response: the response the bot will give to the user
• errorPrompt: the error to be described at the user
• type: this can be 'text','email','number','url','time','choice'
• choices: this only work for the 'choice' type, you specify the choices separated by a pipe

Motivation

The absense of a FormFlow library for the Node.js BotBuilder SDK.

Installation

Create a new bot and get the libraries using npm

npm init
npm install --save botbuilder
npm install --save formflowbotbuilder

Create a new sampledata.json file and insert the necessary steps using the format we described above. Create a file called app.js

const builder = require('botbuilder');
const formflowbotbuilder = require('formflowbotbuilder');

const connector = new builder.ConsoleConnector().listen();
const bot = new builder.UniversalBot(connector);

//just a name for the dialog
const myDialogName = 'getFields';

formflowbotbuilder.executeFormFlow('./sampledata.json', bot, myDialogName, function (err, responses) {
  if (err) {
    console.log(err);
  } else {
    bot.dialog('/', [function (session) {
      session.beginDialog(myDialogName);
    },
      function (session, results) {
            // responses from the user are in results variable as well as in the responses callback argument
        session.send('results: ' + JSON.stringify(responses));
      }]);
  }
});

License

MIT

More info

Check out the blog post here