Microsoft bot works locally but not when published

Question

So I created a chatbot which works perfectly fine on the Microsoft Bot Framework Channel Emulator when run locally.

However, after I publish it, when I test it on Telegram, I get Error 500: "POST to pbot2 failed: POST to the bot's endpoint failed with HTTP status 500".

I have absolutely no clue as to where I might have gone wrong. Usually its a credentials issue if it works locally but not when published, but I tried testing connection to my bot on the Microsoft Bot website and it gives me: Endpoint authorization succeeded. So credentials is definitely not an issue.

Googling gives me results where the problem is with the backward compatibility of the System.IdentityModel.Tokens.jwt, but I did not update that package so that should not be an issue.

At this point I've ran out of ideas, will appreciate any help! Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Without a little more context I might not be of much help; however there are a number of tools you can use:

1) If you hook up app insights in the bot framework portal, we'll log exceptions we see from your bot into app insights. The first couple million transactions a month are free for dev time debugging it's a must have.

2) 500 is internal server error. I assume your bot is set to take the other activity types beyond just "Message"? You'll get conversationUpdate Activity messages from the channel that you won't see automatically in the emulator.

3) You can point the emulator at your cloud endpoint and verify there as well and often get more detail for exceptions than you will in your chat channel.

Let us know what you find.

Answer 2

You're getting an uncaught exception; what I do is wrap everything in in the Post method in MessageController.cs in try...catch, and when the exception is caught, send the exception's Message and StackTrace into the chat. Usually the first few lines will contain the general error description and most of the times the line number.

catch (Exception ex)
        {
            string error = Emoji.Blush;

            //for debugging in bot emulator, also output stack trace
            if (activity.ChannelId == "emulator" 
                 || activity.ChannelId == "facebook" //uncomment this line to get stack traces on facebook too
               )
            {
                error += ex.Message + ex.StackTrace;
            }

            //create response activity
            Activity response = activity.CreateReply(error);

            //post back to user
            ConnectorClient connector = new ConnectorClient(new Uri(activity.ServiceUrl));
            await connector.Conversations.ReplyToActivityAsync(response);

        }