Question - Using states as conditional "gateways" about jaicf-kotlin

[nikvoloshin]

Thanks for the detailed explanation!

I agree that it would be a great feature, but I don't think something like that will be added in a near future, sorry...

There are several ideological reasons why we don't want to extend our DSL this way, also there are several technical reasons why it is hard to implement "continue and evaluate children" logic as a runtime feature too (e.g. as a reactions extension)
And in any case implementing such a feature will require us to greatly redesign JAICF base logic

As for now, I can only advice to use the onlyIf feature in order to customize activation logic based on context variables

[nikvoloshin]

Hi @CiaronHowell !
JAICF has an onlyIf feature that may help you
Unfortunately, there is no way to compose activation rules in a tree-like structure in JAICF, but you can customize all of your intent rules separately to activate only if there is a property in a context
Hope it helps!

[CiaronHowell]

Ah right, that's fair enough. The main reason for asking about this functionality is that it would reduce a lot of duplicated code for checking the condition.

Do you think this "continue and evaluate children" functionality could be added as a reaction method?

[davidmeredith]

I'd support Ciaron's request here, but I think Ciaron is referring to Watson's 'Folders' which simply exist to 'unlock' a set of child nodes/states depending on a logical condition. A folder doesn't itself have a reaction/response, it just makes child nodes available for activation. We've built non-trivial dialogue models with Watson, and have found the Folders functionality a really useful abstraction to help model anaphora using context variables (e.g. 'lastTopic=painManagement') and it really helps build and mange complex flows. I think this would be a great addition to your DSL.

[davidmeredith]

fair enough, one to shelve for future perhaps. Best wishes.

[CiaronHowell]

Well explained @davidmeredith!

And in any case implementing such a feature will require us to greatly redesign JAICF base logic
That makes sense, for a 'nice to have' it'd be understandably difficult to justify it at this time!

Thanks again for your time @nikvoloshin.