In SUSI.AI, we use skill editor for creating and editing public/private skills. The editor we use is Ace editor. The skill is written in a code format documented here. This works fine for a developer but for a user with little experience in coding, this can be confusing. Hence, for providing more clarity as to what the skill does, I built conversation view and tree view along with code view for the skill editor.

Conversation view shows the skill in form of actual conversation between the user and the bot while tree views shows the same conversation in form of a tree. Earlier these views were implemented by converting the code view into an object containing user queries and SUSI responses.

While this works for simple skills, it obviously won’t work for a complex skill in which the responses are fetched from an API. Hence we needed live responses from SUSI server.

This is done similar to how preview works. We pass the whole skill in an instant parameter in the chat.json API along with the user query. This gives us the response from SUSI in form of a JSON.

API Call:

We send a GET request to the following URL:

https://api.susi.ai/susi/chat.json?q=userQuery&instant=wholeSkill

This contains two parameters:

• q: The user query is passed in this parameter.
• instant: The whole skill code (present in the code view) is passed in this parameter.

The response is a JSON providing response from SUSI.

Getting user queries:

We can not rely on user to provide the user queries in conversation view and tree view because the user has already provided it in the code view. Hence, we fetch the user queries from code view. This is simply done by dissecting the code and putting all the lines which don’t start with ::, !, #, {, } and “ in an array. Then we split the entries of this array wherever a vertical bar (|) is found. This provides us an array containing all the user queries. It’ll be clear from the following function:

fetchUserInputs = () => {
  let code = this.state.code;
  let userInputs = [];
  let userQueries = [];
  var lines = code.split('\n');
  for (let i = 0; i < lines.length; i++) {
    let line = lines[i];
    if (
      line &&
      !line.startsWith('::') &&
      !line.startsWith('!') &&
      !line.startsWith('#') &&
      !line.startsWith('{') &&
      !line.startsWith('}') &&
      !line.startsWith('"')
    ) {
      let user_query = line;
      while (true) {
        i++;
        if (i >= lines.length) {
          break;
        }
        line = lines[i];
        if (
          line &&
          !line.startsWith('::') &&
          !line.startsWith('!') &&
          !line.startsWith('#')
        ) {
          break;
        }
      }
      userQueries.push(user_query);
    }
  }
  for (let i = 0; i < userQueries.length; i++) {
    let queries = userQueries[i];
    let queryArray = queries.trim().split('|');
    for (let j = 0; j < queryArray.length; j++) {
      userInputs.push(queryArray[j]);
    }
  }
  this.setState({ userInputs }, () => this.getResponses(0));
};

Getting response to a single query at a time:

Now, we have an array containing all the user queries but we can not simply run a loop through the array and then get responses for each query because the AJAX call that we’re making to fetch response is asynchronous. Hence, this will result in multiple AJAX calls in a very short period of time. This will cause a failure in fetching responses and conversation view won’t work. We definitely don’t want that.

To solve this problem, we get response for a single query at a time and make the next AJAX call only when the response for the current call is received. You can see in the code snippet provided in last section, after updating state of userInputs, we’re calling getResponses as a callback and passing 0. This 0 is the index of array which will be incremented on every successful AJAX call. The following code snippet will demonstrate this:

$.ajax({
  type: 'GET',
  url: url,
  contentType: 'application/json',
  dataType: 'json',
  success: function(data) {
  let answer;
  if (data.answers[0]) {
    // Putting response in an object along with user query
    if (responseNumber + 1 === userInputs.length) { // Stopping when responses are fetched for all user queries.
      this.setState({ loaded: true });
    }
    this.setState({ responseData }, () => // updating the response data
      this.getResponses(++responseNumber),  // Incrementing the index and calling getResnponses again as a callback when response data state is updated.
    );
  }.bind(this),
  error: function(err) {
    console.log(err);
  }.bind(this),
});

The code snippets I provided are used in conversation view. Same algorithm is used in tree view as well.

References:

• Ace Editor: https://ace.c9.io/ 
• AJAX call: http://api.jquery.com/jquery.ajax/