Botframework Prompt dialogs until user finishes

Question

I'm creating a chat bot for slack using Microsoft's botbuilder and LUIS.

Is there a way to keep using builder.Prompts.text() to keep asking the user if there are anymore information the user wants to put, like a for or while loop? For example I want to keep on asking the user an undefined number of times if there's a key the user wants to save and only stop when the user types done and then I will have an equal number of builder.Prompts.text() to ask the user for the values to put in each of those keys.

function (session, results, next) {
  builder.Prompts.text(session, "Another key to put?");
},
function (session, results, next) {
  builder.Prompts.text(session, "Value to put?");
}

It doesn't seem like I can create some sort of loop with an array that saves each key with its value, I'm not sure how to approach this.

Thanks.

Answer 1

What you're looking for is session.replaceDialog(); there is an example labeled 'basics-loops' on the GitHub repo for the SDK. To loop through prompts, one has to create a small dialog with the desired prompts and have the dialog restart automatically via session.replaceDialog() or session.beginDialog().

I've built a chatbot that receives key-value pairs in the scenario you specified above. The code excerpt below is the final step in my 'Loop' dialog.

function (session, results) {
    var value = results.response ? results.response : null,
        key = session.dialogData.key;
    var pairs = session.userData.kVPairs;
    var newPair = {};
    newPair[key] = value;
    if (key && value) {
        session.userData.kVPairs.push(newPair);
        console.log(pairs[pairs.length - 1]);
    }
    session.send('latest key-value pair added, { %s : %s }', key, value);
    session.replaceDialog('Loop');
} 

session.replaceDialog('Loop') is incorporated at the end of this waterfall step and takes the Id of the new dialog. The method can also take optional arguments to pass to the new dialog.

Note: While not applicable here, the difference between replaceDialog and beginDialog/endDialog is semi-obvious, when you use beginDialog, the new dialog is added to the stack. When you end that child dialog, you will be returned to the original/parent dialog. replaceDialog will end the current dialog and begin the new one.

Answer 2

You may use replacedialog to loop the user:

bot.dialog("/getUserKeys", [
   function (session, args, next) {
       session.dialogData.keys = args && args.keys ? args.keys : [];
       builder.Prompts.text(session, "Another key to put?");
   },
   function (session, results, next) {
       if (results.response === "none") {
           session.endDialogWithResult({response: { keys: session.DialogData.keys }});
           return;
       }
       session.dialogData.keys[session.dialogData.keys.length] = results.response;
       session.replaceDialog("/getUserKeys", { keys: session.DialogData.keys });
   }
]);