Prompt the user for missing entities while in the intent and wait till they respond

Question

I've been trying to solve this, I imagine it may be quite easy but I just can't find a way to achieve it yet.

I have a very simple Luis Intent as follows:

[LuisIntent("xxx")]
public async Task xxx(IDialogContext context, LuisResult result)
{
    var entities = new List<EntityRecommendation>(result.Entities);
    //do stuff eg. Prompt.Text(contenxt, "Enter your name");
    //await prompt
    //store new response into the variable
}

What I want to achieve is to prompt the user for any missing entities in their query and save it for later use in this intent. The problem is the intent does not await for the user to respond and just continues execution as normal.

What am I missing on this one?

Thanks in advance.

You can't use "Prompt.Text" like this - you have to send your request for Entities as normal reply and then when the user replies your bot have to merge several incoming messages to get the whole picture.. — rudolf_franek
Thanks for the reply, would you mind providing an example of this? — Georgios R.

Ed Boykin Ed Boykin · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-21T14:57:24

You need to call a new dialog to prompt for the rest of the entities. I would use a FormFlow dialog based on all the entities you are trying to capture. Basically, you want to assume none of you entities come through on the Luis intent, this way you can prompt the user for everything. So, with FormFlow, you can specify the initial state of the FromFlow. To do this, create an instance and fill in the properties with the entites you did receive. FormFlow will skip steps for any of the fields that are already populated. Optionally, when you launch you FormDialog, you can pass in 'FormOptions.PromptFieldsWithValues'. This will tell the dialog to still prompt the user for ALL values but will use the filled in value as the default. You would do this if you wanted to give the user the option of changing something.

Here's a basic example I pulled from github.

This is the class that defines your state. You would build this based on the entities you want to receive

public class SampleQuestion
{
    public string FavoriteColor;
    public string FavoritePizza;
}

This is a generic dialog method but it would be what your intent method would kind of look like

    async Task StartAsync(IDialogContext context)
    {
        var question = new SampleQuestion();

        // Pre-populate a field. This is where you fill in with the entities you got from LUIS
        question.FavoriteColor = "blue";

       //Now call FormBuilder to ask the user for the remaining entities
        context.Call<SampleQuestion>(new FormDialog<SampleQuestion>(question), OnSampleQuestionAnswered);
    }

    //this is the return from you FormBuilder. This is where you get back into you LUIS dialog and continue processing with, hopefully, all the entities you need now
    public async Task OnSampleQuestionAnswered(IDialogContext context, IAwaitable<SampleQuestion> sampleQuestion)
    {
        var result = await sampleQuestion;
    }

Hope this helps.

Prompt the user for missing entities while in the intent and wait till they respond

2 Answers