How to stop a loop on slot - Watson Conversation tooling - watson-conversation

Question

I have been using Watson Conversation for quite some time. Recently, with the news features, I started using the slot option. I would like to know if it is possible to stop a loop with a counter directly on the tooling. I can stop the loop using a diferent condition on manage handlers, but not with a counter.
Anyone knows how to do that on the the tooling?

Answer 1

So you are in the right area. You use the handlers.
1. Create a context variable called counter and set it to a value of 1. The reason for 1 is that setting it to 0 can make it invisible. Do this in the welcome part.
2. Create your slot. For the example, I am setting the condition as input.text == "go".
3. Set up your slots as normal. Again for the example, I look for $person and $date (#sys-person and #sys-date)
4. In the handler for the first response on "If answer to any prompt is not found and:" set the JSON to:
{
"conditions": "$counter > 3",
"output": {
"text": {
"values": [
"You have gotten the question wrong too many times."
],
"selection_policy": "sequential"
}
},
"context": {
"date": "cancel",
"person": "cancel",
"counter": 99
}
}
This will activate if the handler is hit 3 times. It will set counter to 99 (see later), set the wanted context variables to "cancel" so as to exit the slot.
5. The second response in the handler, set it to this JSON.
{
"output": {},
"context": {
"counter": "<? $counter = $counter + 1 ?>"
}
}
This is your increment for counter.
6. Back to the main part of the slot. In the "Then respond with:", set the condition to:
$date != "cancel" or $person != "cancel"
and set the response to display your values. At this point it should work. However if you try to enter the slot again it will fail. So lets build a handler for that.
7. Create a child node under your slot. Set your slot to "finally jump to" the condition block.
8. In your child node, set the condition to: $counter == 99. For your JSON response put in the following:
{
"context": {
"counter": 1,
"date": null,
"person": null
},
"output": {}
}
This resets the counter, and removes the slot variables. This allows you to re-enter the slot.
Here is an example conversation workspace: https://pastebin.com/caA2gb5u
To follow on from this (not in the example). You can use the individual slot handlers for each context variable to reset the counter in the same way.