Force button payload to specific intent without entities

I’m wondering what the best way is to achieve the following: My user searches for a product, then I return a list of buttons that represent products. Now the customer selects a product by clicking on the respective button. Now I add the product to his cart.

In the past, for this I defined an entity “product” and an intent “selected_products” and then created a story like this:

## user adds items to cart
* agent.add_cart_items{"item": "Yoghurt"}
    - action_search_items . # This presents user some products as buttons
* user.selected_products{"products": "123"}
    - action_add_cart_items

With a button looking like this:

{
    "title": product["name"],
    "image_url": product["imageUrl"],
    "buttons": [
        {
            "type": "postback",
            "title": "Add",
            "payload": '/user.selected_products{{"products": ["{product_id}"]}}'.format(product_id=product['id']),
        },
    ]
}

Which worked fine. However, I don’t really like having a “product” entity just for passing the product IDs. Is there a way to e.g. use an inform intent? Something like this:

## user adds items to cart
* agent.add_cart_items{"item": "Yoghurt"}
    - action_search_items . # This presents user some products as buttons
* inform  # Not using entities here
    - action_add_cart_items  # Pick message value as product id

With a button like this:

{
    "title": product["name"],
    "image_url": product["imageUrl"],
    "buttons": [
        {
            "type": "postback",
            "title": "Add",
            "payload": '/inform:123',
        },
    ]
}

So sending a message while specifying the intent at the same time? Or is specifying the product entity the best way to go?

1 Like

I think your existing solution of using an intent is the best one :slight_smile:

Currently there is no API for adding parameters to an intent

Hi, @smn-snkl

actually I am trying to do restaurant food ordering, I am using image slider with order button along with image. In this case how can I do it in rasa to order food. Please help me. give me any example you have.

Thanks in advance.