Common story fragments?

Rasa Open Source
1

I started using the < checkpoint feature and it’s nice and works well in some cases where my story ends with that checkpoint, and from what I can tell, this is the way it has to work, you can’t insert a checkpoint into the middle of a story or else you get story conflicts.

I’m curious if there is any good way to create something similar to a checkpoint but more like a common reusable fragment. The resulting functionality would be that it allows you to insert a story into a story.

Here’s one type of example, but there are other good reasons to break out a set of common story steps.

I have many support scenarios and some of them require a user’s ID number so the bot can go look up information related to their ID. There are other things you can do with the bot that don’t require the ID, so I don’t want to prompt the user for their ID, if I don’t need it.

I would like to have a fragment story like this:

## Prompt user for their ID number
> fragment_prompt_for_idnumber
  - form_database_query_customer
  - form{"name": "form_database_query_customer"}
  - form{"name": null}
  - utter_greet_first_name

I would like to be able to insert it into a larger story with >prompt_for_idnumber like this -

## 003 Buyer issue happy path with done
* buyer
  - utter_response_can_help
  > fragment_prompt_for_idnumber
  - utter_buyer_start
  - buyer_form
  - form{"name": "buyer_form"}
  - form{"name": null}
  - utter_anythingelse
* deny
  - utter_in_that_case
  - utter_goodbye
  - utter_goodbye_signoff
  - action_restart
* affirm
  - utter_whatelse

Is there currently any way to do this?

My thoughts / hacky idea:

I could create my own custom syntax, write stories in another directory, and build a python script that munges over all of my stories and inserts the fragment code where it should go and produce a final robust stories.md file to train on.

I’m hoping there’s a better way and open to ideas

2

Hi @jonathanpwheat!

Just wanted to add to your idea, you can build a custom training data importer, so as you said, you can write your stories however you want then import them in rasa format with your custom importer.

3

Hmm, never thought about using that, maybe I’ll try something like that.

Truth be told, I’d prefer out-of-the-box support for common story fragments though :slight_smile:

4

Yeah you are right. I also felt need for such a feature sometimes ago. Maybe other folks here could help you. You could also open a feature request for that, it’ll certainly be a good addition I think.