article by Frank Nimphius, June 2020
Especially when Oracle Digital Assistant is made available on websites or web applications, developers look for a web-type look and feel and behavior of bot responses to seamlessly integrate the bot into the surrounding web environment. Because Oracle Digital Assistant can be exposed through multiple messenger channels as well as by voice, it is important that optimized web integration does not tie a bot to a single channel.
In this article I explain how you use font awesome and a custom component to render menus as iconic buttons on the web and as action lists on other channels. The adaptive behavior is fully implemented in the custom component so that no markup is added to the BotML code. Reading this article and looking at the provided custom component sample and code, you learn
- How to build a custom component that returns different responses based on channel detection
- How to return markup in component responses and invoking client-side JavaScript functions
- How to create an action list with icons for non-web channels
- How to use font awesome with the Oracle Web SDK
Downloads
Note: I did not make font awesome available for download. Please get your copy of font awesome or reference their CDN. Also, the configuration of font awesome in the index.html file is not provided. Its a single line of markup though that is well documented in the article.
Related Articles and Documents
Oracle Web SDK (Web messenger) product documentation
TechExchange: How to create bots that return optimized responses for different messenger channels
Tech-Exchange Quick-Tip: Adding Channel Specific UI Extensions Using the System.CommonResponse Component ChannelCustomProperties Property (MS Teams Example)
TechExchange Quick-Tip: Using RAW Message Payloads in Custom Components to Leverage Channel Specific UI Extensions (MS TEAMS Example)
TechExchange: How-to Download Documents in Oracle Digital Assistant Conversations
TechExchange: All 2-Minutes Oracle Digital Assistant Tech Tip Videos on YouTube
