Get teamId in message extension handler - botframework

When developing a message extension for Microsoft Teams, is it possible to retrieve the ID of a team where the user is invoking the message extension command without first adding the bot to that team?
I can do this when the bot is added to the team manually based on TeamsInfo.getTeamDetails(), however, I don't really need (or want) to add the bot to the team for my goal. All I need is the channel ID (which is available from the context/conversation) and the ID of the underlying team. Retrieving the team details without the bot being added beforehand errors with "The bot is not part of the conversation roster".

Have a look at the ChannelData property on the Activity class, that should give what you need. You can read more about it here.
Here's an example of the underlying payload, for interest:
"channelData": { "eventType": "channelCreated", "tenant": { "id": "72f988bf-86f1-41af-91ab-2d7cd011db47" }, "channel": { "id": "19:693ecdb923ac4458a5c23661b505fc84#thread.skype", "name": "My New Channel" }, "team": { "id": "19:693ecdb923ac4458a5c23661b505fc84#thread.skype" } }

we had the same trouble with the Team documentation and APIs.
However for that specific case, we found a solution that may work for you. I will say is more a hack than a solution. But it worked on my use case. It will only work on messages with attachments.
When the context is received in a message, the message contains an attachments array. Each attachment object has a contentUrl. Inside that url is the mailNickname for the group. That mailNickname field represents a readeable unique id. The format is something like sites/{mailNickname}/General.
from there you can retrieve the field and use the Groups Graph API.
With a query like this one:
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups?$filter=startswith(mailNickname, 'themailNicknameFromcontenturl')
You will get the group full information, including the aadGroupId
In general, is a nightmare to work with Teams documentation. Hope this hack helps you.

Related

Starting a new conversation in a Teams channel via REST

As far as I know, there are two APIs that are required to interact with bots
Graph - Access to Microsoft Graph endpoints, which do not provide access to conversations in Teams.
Bot Framework - The endpoints in this API provide access to conversations.
Moving past the difficulty of finding bot-user IDs, the problem becomes the creation of a new conversation in a channel by the bot. This link says it should be possible, but I have not been successful after hours of attempts.
The service URL in the documentation does not match my requests. It says https://smba.trafficmanager.net/teams/, but I see https://smba.trafficmanager.net/amer/ and https://smba.trafficmanager.net/apis/ in other places. Which one is it?
The crux of the issue is the required fields in the JSON data. This link is meant to help with the creation of channel conversations, but it does not explain the data. In that section is the following comment:
Alternatively, you can use the REST API and issue a POST request to /conversations resource.
which leads to here. Unfortunately, that page does not explain how this works because the sample JSON data is incomplete and not targeted at channels. It appears to be related only to new group chats.
Ultimately, I am requesting an example JSON request to the POST /v3/conversations endpoint, which will create a new conversation in a Team (conversationType = channel, to be clear). This is how it is supposed to look for a new group chat, which does not work with a channel:
{
"bot": {
"id": "12345678",
"name": "bot's name"
},
"isGroup": false,
"members": [
{
"id": "1234abcd",
"name": "recipient's name"
}
],
"topicName": "News Alert"
}
What you're trying to do is called "Proactive Messaging" - basically, it's having your bot create the first message in a series, rather than being the 'recipient' in the usual case. You definitely will need a bot for this, but it sounds like you have one already so that's good. In essence, in a Teams context, you're never really starting a 'new' conversation with the bot, it's just 'continuing' an existing one, so you're wanting to post to the endpoint of that converation. I've covered (I hope well) in some other answers, so please refer here for more: Sending proactive messages from an outside process to organizational users via Teams chat bot . If you're still stuck, let me know and I'll try help further.
I managed to get a JSON object to create a conversation. I have been at this for days, by the way.
The following JSON object will create a new conversation in the General channel of a Team:
{
"activity": {
"type": "message",
"text": "got here"
},
"bot": {
"id": "{{botID}}",
"name": "{{botName}}"
},
"channelData":{
"teamsChannelId":"{{teamID}}",
"teamsTeamId":"{{teamID}}",
// The channel ID of the General channel is the team ID
// Use another channel ID here if you want the message to go elsewhere
"channel":{"id":"{{teamID}}"},
"team":{"id":"{{teamID}}"},
"tenant":{"id": "{{tenantID}}"}
},
"isGroup": true,
"tenantId": "{{tenantID}}"
}
Here is the way to reply:
POST {{urlBase}}/v3/conversations/{{conversationId}}/activities
{
"bot": {
"id": "{{botID}}",
"name": "{{botName}}"
},
"text": "reply test",
"type": "message"
}
where urlBase is something like https://smba.trafficmanager.net/amer and conversationId is something like 19:c25ae532345659b67313c54e1310fdb6#thread.tacv2;messageid=2456564642569 .
A ton of helpful information can be found here. That link is buried and completely obscure, but it has most of what you'll want for low-level calls.
Unfortunately, adding a title/subject to the conversation seems to be impossible, which completely breaks my use case. All that work yielded nothing for me because the easiest part is missing, but at least I figured it out. I hope this helps someone.

Teams Bot Adaptive Card action.Submit returns undefined but works in Bot Emulator

I am having an issue with Teams Bot adaptive card action submit, when testing Bot Emulator it works as expected, but when it's published and performing the same action in Teams conversation, the action submit returns undefined.
I have attempted with both adaptive card version 1.0, and version 1.3, the issue is the same in both cases.
Anyone know a solution for this?
The other answer provides some useful background, but I think it's only applicable to specific scenarios - I think the issue you're having here is that you're sending a raw string value in the data property ("My Action") which Teams doesn't like, but the emulator doesn't mind at all. You can see more about that described in this Microsoft blog post. You should instead be sending an actual object. I describe it in more detail in this answer: QnA Maker Bot AdaptiveCards: how to add Data object in C#.
What #billoverton is referring to is a specific use case where you want the button behaviour to be, for instance, actually putting a message into the text stream as a response, as well as sending it to your bot. There are various options for these specific use cases, as described here, but they are optional if you want this specific behaviour. If you're happy for the user to click the button and that to simply invoke the message to your bot, you don't need the "msteams" section in the data payload.
A "standard" action.submit won't work in Teams. You need to add an msteams object under the data attribute. I'm guessing you are using a standard definition like
{
"type": "ActionSet",
"actions": [
{
"type": "Action.Submit",
"title": "My Action",
"data": "My Action"
}
]
}
For Teams, it instead needs to look like this:
{
"type": "ActionSet",
"actions": [
{
"type": "Action.Submit",
"title": "My Action",
"data": {
"msteams": {
"type": "imBack",
"value": "My Action"
}
}
}
]
}
Of course when you do this, it won't work in the emulator or any non-teams channel. I've seen some people update their onMessage handler to account for this by extracting the value so a single card definition can work for both channels, but it made the selection a backchannel event for one of the channels (can't remember if it was web or Teams) which was not the experience I was looking for. So instead, I just conditionally display a Teams or non-Teams card based on channel. For example:
if (context.activity.channelId == 'msteams') {
var welcomeCard = CardHelper.GetMenuCardTeams();
} else {
var welcomeCard = CardHelper.GetMenuCard();
}
If you are not using a helper to generate your cards you can define them explicitly here, though I do recommend using a helper to keep things clean. This does mean that you need to maintain two versions of your cards, but for me it was worth it to ensure a consistent experience across channels.

Dispatch CLI not passing Entities from Luis App

When generating a Dispatch model using the CLI, it doesn't pass the Entities from the Luis app in reference. This drastically affects the accuracy of the dispatch app.
For example, for the utterance "My [iPhone] isn't working", iPhone is attached to an entity list name CellPhoneType. There are three items in the list iPhone, Samsung, Smartphone.
In the bot emulator, using the Dispatch, if I write "my iPhone isn't working", the dispatch model passes it to Luis, as it should. However, if I write "my smartphone isn't working", the dispatch tool sends it over to QnA Maker.
I checked the model, and the entities are not passed in reference. I also tested with simple entities, they do not work as well.
I have the most recent version of the CLI installed.
Is this normal, is this a bug? Is there a work around to fix this?
So a couple things to address here with how you've built your LUIS model and what to expect from dispatch. Skip down to 2.) if you're a user who's reading this post and already has entities working in child LUIS models beautifully. #AlexandreViegas, read point 1.) to help properly build your LUIS model to detect intent properly in dispatch.
1. Use a Simple Entity + Phrase List to take Advantage of LUIS's machine learning--not List Entity
Right now it seems like your choice of using a list entity is not the best way to go here, and not how it's intended to be used. Instead list entities are used for terms that might have multiple ways of referring to the same thing.
Examples of When You Would Want to Use a List Entity
For example, California, Cali, CA, and The Golden State are all terms that refer to the same thing (a state). You can create a "States" list entity, include all 50 U.S. states and their nicknames. Now since this is a closed, explicit list, there is no machine learning when you use a list entity--LUIS will only detect "States" list entity if there's an exact text match.
Another example of when you would want to use list entities would be say with "Departments" for a school. You could have "chemistry", "CHEM142", "chem", etc. all meant to refer to that specific department, and do so with the rest of the departments in the school.
Why you want to use a Simple Entity and add a Phrase List
You can refer to this other StackOverflow answer I wrote, regarding how to create a simple entity and boost the signal of the entity using a phrase list.
To not completely duplicate the answer given in the link above, in essence, you want to use a simple entity, so LUIS can properly predict terms as CellPhoneType entity, even though you did not explicitly include it in your model.
For example you could have a Phone intent with utterances labeling various words as CellPhoneIntententity.
When I go to the Test panel, I type in "sunflower" and "moonstone" as made up mobile phones (maybe some phone company in the future creates phones with these names as their models):
Above you can see LUIS correctly predicts Phone intent and correctly extracts sunflower and moonstone as CellPhoneType entities.
However if I enter in brand names of mobiles that don't exist in the English language--for example Blackberry's "Z3" or T-Mobile's "G2X", LUIS cannot detect this with our model as is right now. (See 2 most recent utterances).
Above you can see utterances "i'd like to order a z3" and "my g2x is broken" do not properly predict as Phone intent, nor do z3 or g2x get detected as CellPhoneType entity. This is where phrase lists come in. As specified in the docs, phrase lists are good for boosting the signal of what a cell phone type may look like, as well as adding proprietary or foreign words to your LUIS model, such as the "made-up" words of many cell phone models. Again, refer to the StackOverflow answer I linked to, if you need guidance on how to create a phrase list.
After adding different names of cell phone models to phrase list
2. Query the endpoint of the LUIS model that was created by dispatch directly
Clarification:
When you add a child LUIS model to dispatch, even if that child LUIS model has entities in it, it will not show up in the model of the parent LUIS model created by dispatch.
the exception to the above bullet would be if you labelled an entity in a pattern
Why entities do not need to be labelled in the parent LUIS model, is because when you call the endpoint of the parent LUIS model, it does sort of a shared call, under the hood, so it doesn't have to ping LUIS twice.
You see the entities labelled from the child LUIS model in the connectedServiceResult property
How to extract entities from child LUIS model, using your parent dispatch LUIS app
Make sure to publish both the child LUIS app and the parent dispatch app.
Going to your parent dispatch-created LUIS app, go to Manage > Keys and Endpoints > click "Endpoint" to open a browser tab where your can query the parent app in the URL after q=
type in your utterances in the URL, after q= to see the entities and intents extracted from the child LUIS model under connectedServiceResult
https://westus.api.cognitive.microsoft.com/luis/v2.0/apps/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx?verbose=true&timezoneOffset=-360&subscription-key=b7xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx67&q=my%20iphone%20is%20broken
{
"query": "my iphone is broken",
"topScoringIntent": {
"intent": "l_Reminders",
"score": 0.99594605
},
"intents": [
{
"intent": "l_Reminders",
"score": 0.99594605
},
{
"intent": "None",
"score": 0.002990469
}
],
"entities": [],
"connectedServiceResult": {
"query": "my iphone is broken",
"topScoringIntent": {
"intent": "Phone",
"score": 0.9658808
},
"intents": [
{
"intent": "Phone",
"score": 0.9658808
},
{
"intent": "Calendar.Add",
"score": 0.0142210266
},
{
"intent": "Calendar.Find",
"score": 0.0112086516
},
{
"intent": "None",
"score": 0.009813501
},
{
"intent": "Email",
"score": 0.0025855056
}
],
"entities": [
{
"entity": "iphone",
"type": "CellPhoneType",
"startIndex": 3,
"endIndex": 8,
"score": 0.998970151
}
]
}
}
Above you can see that the parent LUIS app created from dispatch properly identifies iphone from the utterance my iphone is broken as a CellphoneType entity.
Note: you will not see results from the child LUIS model in the Test panel of the parent dispatch, because the UI does not show connectedServiceResult

Correct way to handle entities anytime in middle of conversation

I have started working with the LUIS and bot framework recently, after having some experience also with API AI / Google home development.
In the sample below that, I will use an example (from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/bot-framework/nodejs/bot-builder-nodejs-dialog-waterfall) is exemplified a step by step interaction with a user. First, it asks for a date, then a number, then a name for the reserve, and so on.
var bot = new builder.UniversalBot(connector, [
function (session) {
session.send("Welcome to the dinner reservation.");
builder.Prompts.time(session, "Please provide a reservation date and time (e.g.: June 6th at 5pm)");
},
function (session, results) {
session.dialogData.reservationDate = builder.EntityRecognizer.resolveTime([results.response]);
builder.Prompts.text(session, "How many people are in your party?");
},
function (session, results) {
session.dialogData.partySize = results.response;
builder.Prompts.text(session, "Who's name will this reservation be under?");
},
function (session, results) {
session.dialogData.reservationName = results.response;
// Process request and display reservation details
session.send("Reservation confirmed. Reservation details: <br/>Date/Time: %s <br/>Party size: %s <br/>Reservation name: %s",
session.dialogData.reservationDate, session.dialogData.partySize, session.dialogData.reservationName);
session.endDialog();
}]);
In my code, I have a similar multi-parameter dialog, but I want to allow the user to answer with multiple information at the same time in any of the responses it have. For example, after providing the reservation date the user can say "a reserve for Robert for 10 people", so both numbers of people and reservation name are giving at the same time.
To identify these text entities I suppose I have to call LUIS and get the entities resolved from the session context. I notice that the bot object has a recognized method that I think can work for that.
My question is how do I organize the structure of the code and the LUIS utterances and entities? Right now I have an intent with some entities and several utterances samples, but if I send this 'partial' user sentence I think it will not be mapped to the same intent and may not identify the entities with a small sentence like that.
How should I handle this? Do I need to provide samples for the intent with these partial sentences, that may contain only some of the entities?
Thanks
Yes, you should provide samples for all those utterances that you want to your intent to recognize. Not a million of samples, but just as few to get everything trained.
Then, the other problem that you might want to solve next, is asking for the information for those entities missing in the utterance. You can do that manually or you could go one step further and explore the LUIS Action Binding library.

New Feature - Update Responses

We have an internal database ID for each course we have. When using the batch function to create courses, the returned information doesn’t not give us any way to get this ID back so we cannot update our database and let it know that the course has been created.
Also updating the deletion response for the same reason would also be handy.
The response for a batch of deletes looks like:
--batch_123456
{}
--batch_123456
--batch_123456
{}
--batch_123456
--batch_123456
{}
--batch_123456
If they are all successful then it's not really a problem, but if something goes wrong then it's impossible to tell which ones were deleted and which ones were not deleted, because according to the API:
" The server may perform your calls in any order. Don't count on their being executed in the order in which you specified them."
A simple message that said "course #123 has been deleted" would be very helpful. That way I could program the callback code to update the database using the ID
For the course creation the response looks like:
--batch_123456
{
"id": "208571459",
"name": "***",
"section": "***",
"ownerId": "123456",
"creationTime": "2015-09-14T13:13:59.622Z",
"updateTime": "2015-09-14T13:14:02.820Z",
"enrollmentCode": "***",
"courseState": "PROVISIONED",
"alternateLink": "***"
}
--batch_123456
I only put in one response to save space. The ID is the new GoogleID of the course, the ID we actually send in which corresponds to the records in our DB does not get returned. So we have to use a combination of other data (ownerID + name) to get the record and update it, but this is not ideal and may not work fro everyone. Again adding in all of the information that get's sent into the response would be very helpful so we can use the callback properly.
I also want to add the more useful specific information should also be added to all error messages. In fact every batch response should have some sort of ID, that way the callback functions can be more useful.
As mentioned briefly in the documentation, you can pass an alias into Courses.id when creating a course to assign an alias to a course as you create it. The alias can include your internal identifier for the course and can be used in future requests.
Alternatively, each request in a batch can be assigned a unique Content-ID header, which will be returned in the response. Many client libraries provide built-in support for setting and getting these IDs.

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