QnA Maker API - Locking up after updates

Question

I'm deleting various records from my QnA Maker KB via the Invoke-RestMethod PowerShell command and then adding some new QnA's with the same command.

I'm finding that sometimes it works and sometimes I get a 400 Bad Request response with the details:

 Invoke-RestMethod : {
  "error": {
    "code": "BadArgument",
    "message": "Invalid input. See details.",
    "details": [
      {
        "code": "ValidationFailure",
        "message": "Kb: <KB Number> is already being updated by Operation: 9766ff66-f950-41ed-b0de-b77d8bc78c23. Please wait for it to complete.",
        "target": "ConcurrentUpdates"
      }
    ]
  }
}

I don't think this is related to the JSON I'm sending as it doesn't fail or work consistently. When I get this response my QnA Maker is then locked from any changes for ~1 hr. I also get the same error if I click Save and Train in the QnA Maker portal.

Any ideas what's happening or how I can debug this?

Can you post the code for the call(s) you are making (in your original post)? My initial thought is something is wrong with the headers and / or body. I suggest this because Invoke-RestMethod shouldn't function any different that Postman, for example. And, Postman handles QnAMaker API operations without issue. I can make a Postman call to update a KB without it locking up. — Steven Kanberg

Matthew Reaveley Matthew Reaveley · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-02T15:39:00

Thank you Steven for pointing me in the right direction.

I tested copying and pasting the JSON body of my requests and sending via Postman and it worked perfectly. Following that I did lots of testing with Invoke-RestMethod and HTTPBin and found that one QnA I was trying to add had characters with accents. Invoke-RestMethod was converting the whole JSON body to Base64 in this case for some reason. Including "charset=utf-8" on the content type fixed it.

I think the locking out for an hour was just a symptom of me sending multiple bad requests to the QnA Maker api...

QnA Maker API - Locking up after updates

1 Answers