Botframework-emulator: Group chat support

[madenwala]

We need the ability to test multiple users in a conversation. Today, I have to deploy my bot service and attach VS to that deployed instance and test from one of the channels to be able to test group conversations. This obviously then interferes with other regular users if your bot has already been published. We really need a solution here to help test a group conversation through the emulator.

[eanders-MS]

In the current release, you're able to add and remove users from the conversation by sending the corresponding conversationUpdate system activity from the app menu:

In the next emulator release, we plan to add basic support for switching between users in the conversation, meaning you'll be able to select which user is 'you'.

Is the functionality described here adequate to test your scenario?

[madenwala]

Yeah, this is not adequate. This seems like its just a simulator for you to be able to test the activity types that come in. But when you're actually in a group chat within, for example, Skype, behaviors are extremely different. Right off the bat, my bot which uses LUIS dialog completely failed once I published my app and turned on Group chat capabilities from the bot framework portal. When in a group chat, you can only interact with the bot if the bot was called with an @ mention. Out of box, LUIS dialogs fail when a mention is in the text because that text contains the XML representing the bot name that was called. So I had to put in code to strip out XML from text before it was sent to my luis app instance. Also my bot uses the Bot Location Control and that didn't work in group chats for the same reason. I ended up having to replace the NuGet reference with a copy of the location control source code so I can edit the code to handle group conversations. This part is a separate issue, but related to this issue I've created, the problem is that there is no way for me to have tested all this code prior to publishing my bot and trying it out from an actual channel because this bot emulator doesn't really emulate group chat.

[eanders-MS]

XML in the text field sounds like a Skype channel bug. XML shouldn't exist in the text field of the message. Hence the name text. Would you mind opening and issue for this over at https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder/issues?

If this XML issue were cleared up in the Skype channel, do you think the emulator with the planned features I described above be adequate to test your scenario?

[eanders-MS]

Closing due to inactivity. If you'd like to continue the discussion please comment here and I will reopen.

[sagarpomal]

@eanders-MS : when is the next emulator release scheduled? We are facing issue while debugging group conversations. Also, in group conversation lets say we send a message to bot - "@bot please use this address", in next step, the response we get is same we entered i.e. it includes the bot's name. Shouldn't it be only "please use this address" in response?

[aleinnocenzi]

Same issue reported from @sagarpomal. Now I have fixed it removing the bot tag in every message the user send to bot, but this is a quite tricky solution. Hope this will be fixed in next updates