SUSI Skill Creator is a service provided to easily create skills for SUSI. The skill can be written in the form of code. The coding syntax is described in SUSI skill tutorial. The problem with this is that we can’t expect everyone to be great coders and be able to understand the document and easily create a skill. Hence, we needed some robust alternatives for people who don’t want to write the code. This is where UI View and Tree View comes in.

What is UI View?

UI View or User Interface View shows the skill in form of chat bubbles. This is useful for demonstrating how the actual chat will look like.

Hello
Hi. I’m SUSI.

The following code will be shown as this in conversation view:

What is Tree View?

Tree view shows the conversation in form of a tree with its branching representing the chats.

Hello|Hi
Hi. I'm SUSI.|Hey there!

The following code will be shown as this in tree view:

How are the views synchronised?

We’re basically not making any API calls or performing any major function in any of the views. The components of different views are solely for their own function. All the API calls are made in a parent component named SkillCreator.

The main reason for creating a parent component is that we need the category, language, name and commit message options to appear on all the three views. Hence, it only makes sense to have a parent component for them and different components for the views.

The default code (that appears in code editor by default) is in a state in SkillCreator. We pass this state to the code view component as a props.

<CodeView
  skillCode={this.state.code}
  sendInfoToProps={this.sendInfoToProps}
/>

Now, we need to get any change made in the code in CodeView and change the code state of SkillCreator accordingly. For that, we have a function named sendInfoToProps which is passed as props to CodeView and is then called from CodeView whenever we make some change. This will be more clear after having a look at the function sendInfoToProps:

sendInfoToProps = value => {
 if (value) {
  this.setState(
   {
     code: value.code ? value.code : this.state.code,
     expertValue: value.expertValue
       ? value.expertValue
       : this.state.expertValue,
     groupValue: value.groupValue
       ? value.groupValue
       : this.state.groupValue,
     languageValue: value.languageValue
       ? value.languageValue
       : this.state.groupValue,
   imagUrl: value.imageUrl ? value.imageUrl : this.state.imageUrl,
   },
   () => this.generateSkillData(),
  );
 }
};

You can see that we update the code in SkillCreator and other states required. Also, you can notice the we’re calling generateSkillData function here. This is done to convert the code to skill data which is sent to Conversation view and Tree view as props.
We’re calling generateSkillData as a callback function because setState is an asynchronous function.
This will demonstrate how this is passed to Conversation view:

<ConversationView
  skillData={this.state.skillData}
  handleDeleteNode={this.handleDeleteNode}
/>

Same is the case for this handleDeleteNode function. We have an option in both Conversation view and Tree view to allow the user to delete a conversation (originally written as skill in code view). On delete, handleDeleteNode is called from the props and the conversation is deleted from the code which is then send to all the views (as props) and the views are updated as well.

References:

• ReactJS Components and Props: https://reactjs.org/docs/components-and-props.html