Botpress tutorial – How to create actions?

Actions are server side function code that can be used inside a node to change the conversation state, call APIs or access databases, so you can do everything that a plain JavaScript function can achieve. In this Botpress tutorial we will learn about actions.

Dialog Manager (DM) invokes an action which passes the following parameters to the action

• user: Includes all attributes of a user.
• session: Includes variables kept for the session’s duration.
• temp: Contains variables which are alive only for the duration of the flow.
• bot: Object containing global variables for this bot (same for all users)
• event: The original (latest) event received from the user in the conversation.
• args: The arguments that were passed to this action from the Visual Flow Builder.
• process: sandboxed VM containing some env-variables (starting with EXPOSED_)

Check out the official documentation for more information on the discussed arguments above.

Botpress has a code editor that can be used to create actions without even leaving the Botpress studio or you can always create Bot specific actions (out\bp\data\bots\<your_bot_id>) or global actions (out\bp\data\global\actions). I have only 1 bot to work with so I always keep all custom actions inside the global scope.

Let us create a bot that takes users email id as input and validates the email signature.

Botpress has some built in actions in out\bp\data\global\actions\builtin location like setVariable, resetContext, etc. For our use case we will create a custom action in the global scope.

Create a custom action (out\bp\data\global\actions\ValidateEmailSignature.js) in Botpress code editor.

/**
   * Validates Email Signature
   * @title Email Signature validation utility
   * @category Utility
   * @author Abhishek Raj Simon
   * @param {string} value - Pass email here
   */
  const myAction = async value => {
    const userId = event.target
    const botId = event.botId
    const emailString = value
    const emailfilter = /^\w+[\+\.\w-]*@([\w-]+\.)*\w+[\w-]*\.([a-z]{2,4}|\d+)$/i
    console.log(emailString)
    temp.isEmailValid = emailfilter.test(emailString)
    console.log(temp)
  }

  return myAction(args.value)

In our custom action we will pass user email id, that validates the email id and assigns either true or false to the temp variable’s isEmailValid key, one of the memory variables supported by Botpress.

Now we will create our Bot’s flow.

Let’s look at each node in the above screenshot

• The 1st node is a greeting node.
• The 2nd node waits for user input, calls our ValidateEmailSignature custom action, later depending on temp.isEmailValid‘s value flow transitions to either Node 3 or Node 4. Please check the below screenshot for more information.
• The 3rd node is a success node, where a valid user email id is found and displayed a success message before ending the flow.
• In case the user email id validation fails, flow transitions to the 4th node that is a failure node. The flow is then transitioned to a retry node.
• The 5th node is the retry node which always transitions to Node 2 to repeat tasks from step 2.

Here is a link to the exported bot. That’s all is there to use a custom code in your Bot. Let me know in the comments section if you have questions for this Botpress tutorial.