Alexa skills kit, trouble getting session attributes to persist - session

Question

I have been working on a skill where I am using Login With Amazon account linking so I can grab the user email address and name to use in my skill. I am doing something similar to the scoreKeeper sample, using the eventHandlers.js and the storage.js for saving items to a database. In the eventHandlers.onLaunch I am successfully getting the profile name and email address from Amazon and I save it to the session.attributes like this:
var profile = JSON.parse(body);
speechOutput="Hello, " + profile.name.split(" ")[0] + ".";
var sessionAttributes = {};
sessionAttributes = { name: profile.name, email: profile.email };
session.attributes = sessionAttributes;
console.log("Name in session:", session.attributes.name);
The console log shows the name so I know it is being saved in the session.attributes, but when I try to access the session.attributes in my storage.js or intentHandlers.js, it shows it as being empty. What am I missing? Thanks in advance. This has been driving me crazy.

Answer 1

I got this working by adding session to the callback of the response.ask function, like this:
ask: function (speechOutput, repromptSpeech, _session) {
this._context.succeed(buildSpeechletResponse({
session: _session,
output: speechOutput,
reprompt: repromptSpeech,
shouldEndSession: false
}));
},
It had session: this._session for saving the session, but that didn't seem to be working for me. Passing it as a variable did.

Answer 2

Let's say you want to obtain city name from the user and be able to access that value later in the Alexa session:
1) Pre-define your key/value pairs in the JSON response:
def build_response(session_attributes, speechlet_response):
return {
'version': '1.0',
'sessionAttributes': {
"session_attributes": {
'NameOfCity': city_name,
}
},
'response': speechlet_response
}
2) In global scope, declare the variable as an empty string:
city_name = "",
3) Whenever you update that variable within a function, make sure you reference that variable as global. For example:
def set_city_name_in_session(intent, session):
card_title = intent['name']
session_attributes = {}
should_end_session = False
if 'CityIntent' in intent['slots']:
global city_name
city_name = intent['slots']['CityIntent']['value']
4) When creating a function that needs to access this variable, pass the global variable as an argument into the function then, within the function, expose all session key/pair values like so:
def access_variables(intent, session, city_name):
card_title = intent['name']
session_attributes = {}
should_end_session = False
exposed_attributes = session['attributes']['session_attributes']
city_name_attribute_value = exposed_attributes.get('NameOfCity')
if (some_kind_of_condition):
do something awesome with city_name_attribute_value
To test, enter sample utterances into Service Simulator then check if values are persisting in your Lambda JSON response.