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Power Virtual Agents: Creating Variables for the bot

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Posted on by D365EL

Hello Community,

When creating variables in Power Virtual Agents, it looks like we would always have to start with a question before we would get the option to create a variable. Is there a way we could create the bot variables outside of a question/node? the issue for creating the variable in a question is that if we delete the question node then we would lose the variable. How can we create a variable and keep it to use for a bot topic, without having to associate the variable with any particular question or node?

Thanks.

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HenryJammes on at

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Hi @D365EL,

In the unified authoring canvas, you can define and manipulate variables directly in the topic canvas.
Work with chatbot variables - Power Virtual Agents | Microsoft Learn

In the classic version, outside of question nodes, you can initialize and update variables using the Bot Framework Composer. See an example of how to initialize and how to update a PVA variable with BFC here: Solved: Re: Integrate a PVA chatbot with Azure OpenAI Chat... - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com)

Henry

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D365EL 40 on at

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Hi @HenryJammes , thanks for the info. So using the unified authoring topic canvas, I see we can create a new variable using the variable management option in my screen shot below, and select Set a variable value, then create the new variable:

In this scenario, I want to create a global variable that is going to be set by an external source. I defined the variable as below. So in this case, do I simply leave the "To value" field blank? because it's going to be set by an external source, so I am not setting any value here. If this "To value" is required to be populated, what and how should I populate this since this is going to be set by an external source? Am I doing this right?

Please advise, thank you!

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HenryJammes on at

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Good question, I don't know if you can leave it undefined or if you shouldn't set it to a blank value (="")

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D365EL 40 on at

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Hi @HenryJammes , but if we set it to a blank value, I am worried if it's going to overwrite what the external source would be setting this variable. Essentially what I am looking to do is to create a global variable to be used by this topic, and this global variable would be set by an external source...

Is that the right area to create new variables outside of any given node - just wanted to make sure I got this part right when you said I could create variables within the topic canvas

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HenryJammes on at

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@CleberM maybe that's something you know for OC + PVA unified canvas integration?

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Robulane on at

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Hi,

This is something we are working on. As a temporary solution, @D365EL you can create a separate topic without trigger queries and put "Set a variable value" nodes there. You can put any value of the variable here as they won't be used, however it is important to assign the value of the correct type. E.g. if your external variable is number, please assign 0, if your external variable is string, assign an empty string. This is needed for PVA to correctly identify the type of the variable. As the topic won't be triggered, the actual values don't matter.

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D365EL 40 on at

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@Robulane , that's a great idea, thank you!

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D365EL 40 on at

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@Robulane , if you don't mind me asking, what's the syntax for setting an empty string in that value field?

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Robulane on at

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D365EL 40 on at

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Thank you @HenryJammes!

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