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Using Adaptive Card date-picker to pass back input to PVA and showing adaptive card multiple times

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Posted on by deceparis

Hey everyone,

I am currently working on an implementation of a date-picker in PVA, I've managed to get to the point that I can get the adaptive card to show up in PVA just fine but I have run into multiple issues which I think are just due to my lack of understanding when it comes to adaptive cards. (https://adaptivecards.io/explorer/Input.Date.html)

What I want to do is let customers put in holiday requests through PVA by:

- Showing a date-picker to let a user pick a holiday start date

- Passing this value back to PVA and confirming the date with the user

- Repeating the above two steps for an end-date.

Then pass the start-, and end-date (ideally formated as DD-MM-YY) to a flow that checks the difference between these dates (using ticks) against a user's available holidays, and then tells a user whether or not they can actually make the request. I've gotten all these flows to work just fine, and can show the date-picker in PVA.

I have two major issues:

1. I don't know how to pass the value back to PVA, I've tried to use global variables but this has not worked, see:

Does anyone know what I am doing wrong here? I thought it may not loop correctly, or may not actually set the value right using turn.activity, I was mostly following the microsoft documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-virtual-agents/advanced-bot-framework-composer-example1) and the other examples. Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong here, and maybe show an example of how to do it right?

The second issue I have is that I cannot seem to call the same adaptive card twice, even if I have made a new dialog in Bot Framework Composer that is a copy of the one showing the adaptive card:

Please ignore the hard-coded dates. 🙂 Here DateCard and DateCardEnd are separate dialogs in Bot Framework Composer (and therefore topics in PVA) but the second one is skipped as you can see.

I hope someone can help me understand this better, and everyone else that might want to do this (though I hope that PVABuild22 might make all of this easier).

Sincerely,

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anemptyhead 2 on at

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Re: Using Adaptive Card date-picker to pass back input to PVA and showing adaptive card multiple times

Hi, I am using adaptive card for datepicker for my bot made with RASA, and using bot framework for MS Teams channel. I am not able to send back the user selected date to my RASA Actions backend through tracker.

Can I get help in understanding how to send back user selected data through datepicker in context of RASA Bots running on Microsoft Teams? Below is the code to my adaptive card:

adaptive_card_json = { "type": "AdaptiveCard", "$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json", "version": "1.3", "body": [ { "type": "Input.Date", "id": "requested_departure_date", "title": "Select a date:", "value": "2023-08-01", "min": "2023-01-01", "max": "2023-12-31" } ], "actions": [ { "type": "Action.Submit", "title": "Submit", "text" : "August 23, 2023", "channel": "botframework", "id" :"requested_departure_date", "data": { "msteams":{ "text":"${requested_departure_date}", "title":"Select", "type":"messageBack", "value" : "/modify_departure_date" }, "style": "positive" } } ] } message = { "type": "message", "text": "Here is the calendar:", "attachments": [ { "contentType": "application/vnd.microsoft.card.adaptive", "content": adaptive_card_json } ] } dispatcher.utter_message(json_message=message)
rubengzz7 29 on at

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Re: Using Adaptive Card date-picker to pass back input to PVA and showing adaptive card multiple times

hello bro! i have another issue moreless related to this... you know how could I solve it?
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General/Adaptive-Cards-Input-Date-Just-Month-and-Year-Multiple-Choice/m-p/1755868
deceparis 46 on at

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Re: Using Adaptive Card date-picker to pass back input to PVA and showing adaptive card multiple times

@rubengzz7 , very happy you managed to figure it out, the whole adaptive card thing had me really stuck for a while. In my case I had to send the adaptive card twice (once for a start date and then another time for the end date), so I copied the topic and made sure to change the IDs so that they are not identical otherwise it skipped for me anyway (as I guess the adaptive card believed that it had already been run, even if it was two different topics). Hope this thread helps someone else!
rubengzz7 29 on at

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Re: Using Adaptive Card date-picker to pass back input to PVA and showing adaptive card multiple times

Update I managed to avoid the bot from skipping the question..

I open the code on the Create tab and then changed the variable
alwaysPrompt to true. It was in false.

Hope it helps for someone!!

Thanks
rubengzz7 29 on at

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Re: Using Adaptive Card date-picker to pass back input to PVA and showing adaptive card multiple times

thank you very much! with your help I finally made it :D.

Im experiencing another issue now because of the logic of my flow. I need to put a date range... for example from 01/01/2022 to 05/08/2022 and my plan was to send two times the adaptive card but the bot is skipping the second one and later on the log it says Traced in a previous run 😕 Maybe there is an adaptive card that ask you for the range to avoid this problem... or what else could I do?
jdee111 71 on at

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Re: Using Adaptive Card date-picker to pass back input to PVA and showing adaptive card multiple times

Thanks!! I tried it this way round too 😄

Seemed to be happy enough!
deceparis 46 on at

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Re: Using Adaptive Card date-picker to pass back input to PVA and showing adaptive card multiple times

@rubengzz7 Ah, but there's progress! I have a flow running in the start that fetches user information based on their name etc.. You need some way of initializing the variable, you can do this by adding a 'ask a question' and just using the variable there, or get a flow running. Then you need to change the variable in there to be a global variable
So you could do something along these lines if you don't want to use a flow:
Note that I have turned this into a global variable by allowing external sources to set the values (just click on the variable and change the settings for it)

@jdee111 so that is what I used, a global variable initialized by a flow (Power Automate), but if you can't use power automate (or it gets too expensive) just make a question topic I think. Not even sure if you could make a topic like that, and keep it empty otherwise with triggerphrases no one will ever get to, just to have the variable initialized.
rubengzz7 29 on at

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Re: Using Adaptive Card date-picker to pass back input to PVA and showing adaptive card multiple times

Thank you for the response. I copied the code except from the line you told me not but im having another error after selecting the date on PVA 😞

We ran into a problem executing your composer dialog. The variable 'TryDate' cannot be set because it was not defined and doesn't exist in this bot
Sent at August 23 at 3:24 PM
Bot true said: Sorry, the bot can't talk for a while. It's something the bot's owner needs to address. Error code: 2023. Conversation ID: 2u4icdGcnrD1AXceuQcXWI-us. Time (UTC): 8/23/2022 9:24:34 PM. The variable 'TryDate' cannot be set because it was not defined and doesn't exist in this bot
Bot true said:
Sorry, the bot can't talk for a while. It's something the bot's owner needs to address. Error code: 2023. Conversation ID: 2u4icdGcnrD1AXceuQcXWI-us. Time (UTC): 8/23/2022 9:24:34 PM. The variable 'TryDate' cannot be set because it was not defined and doesn't exist in this bot

I think the problem may be in one of this boxes
jdee111 71 on at

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Re: Using Adaptive Card date-picker to pass back input to PVA and showing adaptive card multiple times

This is great - how did you get to pass the value back to PVA? I see you used virtualagent.TryDate... did you use a bot variable?
deceparis 46 on at

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Re: Using Adaptive Card date-picker to pass back input to PVA and showing adaptive card multiple times

Hey @rubengzz7 ,

Have you added the adaptive card under 'Bot Responses'? My code there looks like:
# adaptivecardjson_datecard() - ``` { "$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json", "type": "AdaptiveCard", "version": "1.0", "body": [ { "type": "TextBlock", "text": "Date Input" }, { "type": "Input.Date", "id": "date", "placeholder": "Enter a date", "value": "2022-01-01" } ], "actions": [ { "type": "Action.Submit", "title": "OK" } ] } ``` # AdaptiveCardDateCard() [Activity Attachments = ${json(adaptivecardjson_datecard())} ] # DateTimeInput_Prompt_f5dxDn() - ${AdaptiveCardDateCard()}
I think that is what you're missing, if you look at what my Bot Dialog then references where you get the error:
It is that same DateTimeInput prompt that is all the way at the end of my code snippet. If I recall correctly this was created automatically for me the first time I actually called the date card. I basically followed the Microsoft guidelines: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-virtual-agents/advanced-bot-framework-composer-example1 (1-4). I don't think you can copy my entire code-snippet, but most of it (everything except the last block starting with #DateTimeInput" as that is created by the dialog calling the card itself.