Bot Routing

Bot Routing Feature

Bot Routing feature enables developers to use many bots inside one channel. One logical scenario can be separated into several independent bots with it own NLU providers or business logic. These are some example usages:

• Multilingual Bots with separate NLU
• A/B Testing
• Canary Deployment

BotRoutingEngine

BotRoutingEngine is an implementation of BotEngine allowing developers to change executable BotEngine for different clients.

val MainBotEngine = BotEngine(MainScenario)

val MultilingualBotEngine = BotRoutingEngine(
    main = "main" to MainBotEngine,
    routables = mapOf("firstEngine" to FirstExampleEngine, "secondEngine" to SecondExampleEngine)
)

• parameter main defines a default engine to process requests until client is routed to another engine.
• parameter routables defines a list of routable engine client requests can be routed to.

When client is routed to another engine, he or she will remain using specified engine until routing back or forward to next bot.

Using Bot Routing requires a shared instance of BotContextManager for every routable engine as BotRoutingContext is stored inside client context. Cleaning client context means erasing all routing state, the execution will be passed back to main engine.

BotRoutingApi

BotRoutingApi can be accessed from action blocks inside scenario. This API grants access to following methods:

• route - route current bot request to specified engine with name from routables map. Next requests will be also send to this engine.
• routeBack - route current bot request back to previous bot engine
• changeEngine - route client all next requests to specified engine with name from routables map.
• changeEngineBack - route client all next requests back to previous bot engine.

Example

Example usage of Bot Routing can be found at Multilingual Bot Example.