How can I pass a required input from application to Amazon Lex Bot? - aws-lambda

Question

I have created a bot with Amazon lex and it's validation & fulfillment with Python and MongoDb.
Bot is working as expected.
Now I am working to integrate my Bot with an ipad application.
Currently my bot asks user about his account id and then bot validate that id in DB and according responses.
Now after integration instead of asking the account id from user, that id should be passed from ipad application to the bot and then bot should responds according.
My question is about this. How can we pass account id from ipad app to bot and then how can my bot or lambda function can get that?
Please suggest if anyone has done similar functionality.

Answer 1

You will want to use requestAttributes or sessionAttributes to pass information like an account ID to your bot with the initial input.
Your bot can then retrieve these from event.requestAttributes or event.sessionAttributes
References: Lex-Lambda Input Event and Response Format
sessionAttributes – Application-specific session attributes that the client sends in the request. If you want Amazon Lex to include them in the response to the client, your Lambda function should send these back to Amazon Lex in the response. For more information, see Setting Session Attributes
requestAttributes – Request-specific attributes that the client sends in the request. Use request attributes to pass information that doesn't need to persist for the entire session. If there are no request attributes, the value will be null. For more information, see Setting Request Attributes
Additional Info
You will want to handle the passing of userInput to your Lex bot yourself in order to include requestAttributes data. To do this, you will need to use PostContent (text or audio input) or PostText (text input only) to send data to your Lex bot.
Your Lex bot will interpret the input and pass along the requestAttributes to your Lambda function, where you can handle the logic based on the Account ID.
Sending user input data as JSON object via PostText:
POST /bot/botName/alias/botAlias/user/userId/text HTTP/1.1
Content-type: application/json
{
"inputText": "Hello Bot",
"requestAttributes": {
"accountID" : "xxxxxxxx"
},
"sessionAttributes": {
"name" : "John Smith"
}
}
To see what Lex will pass to your Lambda Function and how to retrieve the requestAttributes there, see this question where I've answered that in more depth:
AWS Lex Python Codehook references