Send parameters to Cortana Skill

Question

I created a chatbot which Cortana is using as a skill, it works great, however, I'm currently reading some parameters from a blob storage file and I'd like to make it more dynamic; is there a way to send parameters upon initialization of the skill coming from Cortana? I read here:

Get the user's profile and contextual information

That Cortana can read the UserInfo such as name, email, localization, etc, but I haven't seen any way to enter custom values that I can read once the message is received on init.

I would appreciate your help, thanks!

Answer 1

Don't forget that Cortana is conversational (RESTful, and for the most part stateless). Ask yourself what configuration is part of the dialog, versus what is part of service. If there is configuration that is sent from the user, then it makes sense to store it on the session using one of the three contexts described: user data, conversation data, or private conversation data. This is all botframework: manage state data.

There are a couple ways you can discern if Cortana is configured or not. If you have not stored the properties on userData, assume you are not configured and change your dialog flow. If you want to check at the time you are invoked, you can always do something like this if( session.message.entities[0].name === 'Microsoft.Launch' ) { ... }

In one of my skills, I just do this... if(! session.userData.bookName ) { session.beginDialog('openBook'); return; } where openBook sets the name.

If this is service related, then you can move your configuration where you like. Keeping it in Azure storage may still require a service restart to use changes (unless you continuously poll.) Conversely, you can put the configuration data in system properties (environment variables), either in your web.config or on the container. For example,

  <configuration>
      <appSettings>
        <!-- update these with your BotId, Microsoft App Id and your Microsoft App Password-->
        <add key="BotId" value="YourBotId" />
        <add key="MicrosoftAppId" value="" />
        <add key="MicrosoftAppPassword" value="" /> ...

You can set IIS to watch for changed in the config file to auto-restart.

Hope this helps.