Bot.Builder.Community.Dialogs.Location

Location Dialog for Bot Builder v4 .NET SDK

Build status

Branch	Status	Recommended NuGet package version
master

Description

This is part of the Bot Builder Community Extensions project which contains various pieces of middleware, recognizers and other components for use with the Bot Builder .NET SDK v4.

This dialog is an implementation based on the Bot Builder Location dialog that Microsoft release for v3 of the Bot Builder SDK.

The dialog, which has 100% feature parity with the v3 dialog, makes it simple for your to prompt your bot's users for a location. It has the following features.

• Address look up and validation using the REST services of Azure Maps or Bing Maps depending on which APOI key you use in your bot.
• User location returned as strongly-typed object complying with schema.org.
• Address disambiguation when more than one address is found.
• Support for declaring required location fields.
• Support for FB Messenger's location picker GUI dialog.
• Customizable dialog strings.

Installation

Available via NuGet package Bot.Builder.Community.Dialogs.Location

Install into your project using the following command in the package manager;

    PM> Install-Package Bot.Builder.Community.Dialogs.Location

Sample

A basic sample for using this component can be found here.

Usage

To use the dialog, add it to your DialogSet as shown below.

Dialogs.Add(new LocationDialog("<YOUR-API-KEY-FOR-BING-OR-AZURE-MAPS>",
                    "Please enter a location", 
                    conversationState,
                    useAzureMaps: false, 
                    requiredFields: LocationRequiredFields.StreetAddress | LocationRequiredFields.PostalCode, 
                    options: LocationOptions.SkipFavorites | LocationOptions.SkipFinalConfirmation 
                    ));

The following settings can be applied when adding your dialog to the DialogSet.

• ApiKey - Required - This should be the API key for the mapping provider you are using
• Prompt - Required - The initial prompt shown to the user. e.g. "Please enter your post code"
• BotState - Required - This is an instance of BotState (e.g. ConversationState or UserState) - this allows the dialog to store / retrieve user favorites. If you set the SkipFavorites flag then this can be passed as null.
• UseAzureMaps - Optional - This defaults to true, in which case Azure maps will be used and you should provide an Azure Maps API key. If you set this to false then Bing Maps will be used and you should use a Bing Maps API key.
• LocationRequiredFields - Optional - Here you can pass in a list of required fields which the use will need to populate if they are empty when a location is found using the initial search. In the example above I have specified Street Address and Post Code are required.
• Options - Optional - Various options to control how the dialog works. Including the abiity to use / not use the favorites functionality, skipping the final confirmation and reverse geocoding of addresses.
• LocationResourceManager - Optional - Here you can provde an implementation of the LocationResourceManager class, which allows you to override the default strings used by the dialog.

In your bot code, when you want to hand off to the Location dialog you can use dc.Begin to do this, as shown in the below example using a Waterfall dialog. When returning, the dialog will return args of type LocationDialogResult, which you can also see below.

    AddDialog(new WaterfallDialog("YourBotsDialog", new WaterfallStep[]
            {
                async (dc, cancellationToken) =>
                {
                        return await dc.BeginDialogAsync(LocationDialog.DefaultLocationDialogId);
                },
                async (dc, cancellationToken) =>
                {
                    if (dc.Result is Place returnedPlace)
                    {
                        dynamic address = returnedPlace.Address;
                        await dc.Context.SendActivityAsync($"Location found: {returnedPlace.Address.FormattedAddress}");
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        await dc.Context.SendActivityAsync($"No location found");
                    }

                    return await dc.EndDialogAsync();
                }
            }));

Passing in BotState using dependency injection

You are required to pass an instance of BotState to the dialog if you wish to use the favorites functionality. You can pass an instance of BotState (e.g. ConversationState) to your bot using dependency injection. e.g. in a .NET Core bot you could do the following in Startup.cs to pass an instance of ConversationState to your bot.

        public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
        {
            services.AddBot<EchoBot>(options =>
            {
                options.CredentialProvider = new ConfigurationCredentialProvider(Configuration);

                IStorage dataStore = new MemoryStorage();
                var conversationState = new ConversationState(dataStore);
                options.State.Add(conversationState);

                var stateSet = new BotStateSet(options.State.ToArray());
                options.Middleware.Add(stateSet);
            });

            services.AddSingleton<ConversationState>(sp =>
            {
                var options = sp.GetRequiredService<IOptions<BotFrameworkOptions>>().Value;

                if (options == null)
                {
                    throw new InvalidOperationException("BotFrameworkOptions must be configured prior to setting up the State Accessors");
                }

                var conversationState = options.State.OfType<ConversationState>().FirstOrDefault();
                if (conversationState == null)
                {
                    throw new InvalidOperationException("ConversationState must be defined and added before adding conversation-scoped state accessors.");
                }

                return conversationState;
            });
        }