Hi everybody, i’m new in rasa so please be patient with me :slight_smile: The thing is that i was working in a BOT and in the 1.10 version i was able to change dynamically the requested slots in the required_slots method of the form actions based in a conditional and the validations work by temselves. [Captura de pantalla de 2020-10-21 09-50-19] When i made the update to the new version i read in the docs that the new way to implement this kind of form is by using a custom action and in a github post ( Custom action class for validating slots with one custom action · Issue #6819 · RasaHQ/rasa · GitHub ) i read that for making the validations is needed to run the validations methods inside the run method of the action maybe i don’t understood it well. So i make this action with the validatios methods with the idea of request the slots depending of the slot_nit_conditional value and making the validation of all the needed slots. [Captura de pantalla de 2020-10-22 08-38-56] i’m almost sure that is not well implemented but i didn’t found the corret way of implement the validations and the conditional slot request in the same action one of the problems with my custom action if i understod well is that the active_loop ends whan all the slots are filled so the form nevers makes the validation of the second slot in the case it is requested and the second issue is that even if i the condition is not True (in this case the required_slots only contain “slot_client_id”) the BOT also ask me for the second slot i’m sure this is a logic problem in my code but could’nt found the correct way of implementing this form. In the domain i have the form declaration in this way. [Captura de pantalla de 2020-10-21 10-21-05] The validation methods are inside the same class of the run method in all the cases, maybe this is not important but i’m working in Ubuntu 20.04 and with a Python venv with Python 3.7.9 installed. i’m trying to use the validation methods that i already have since version 1.10, so the returns of the methods looks like these. [Captura de pantalla de 2020-10-21 12-13-34] [Captura de pantalla de 2020-10-21 12-12-39]

In Rasa 2.1 there’s now an updated version of FormValidationAction that should make many of the issues tackled above easy. See in particular the docs on advanced usage of forms .

@JialiuXu I’m afraid your use case is starting to grow quite hairy here… The current behaviour, I think, is the desired one – a validate_{slot} function should update the tracker. If there’s a reason why you don’t want to update the tracker, then maybe you can pass a new tracker (or a copy of the current tracker) to validate()? By the way, if you don’t want to modify the code of FormValidationAction, you can always inherit from Action. That way, you can create a class that will be almost like FormValidationAction but some parts of it will be customized. If you look at what code FormValidationAction adds on top of Action, it should be possible to adapt these for your purposes…

Thanks for your reply, Sam @SamS Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear, I didn’t mean validate_{slot} function not update the tracker, but it shouldn’t validate the slots I set from previous actions and already in the tracker, what happens here is: The bot make an API call and get the user name: name/guest user use SlotSet update tracker: name/None if guest user I want to use this form collect user info, def required_slots(self, tracker: Tracker) -> List[Text]: name = tracker.get_slot("name") name1 = tracker.get_slot("name1") if name and (not name1): return ["name1"] elif name and name1: return ["gender", "ethnic" ,"DOB", "region"] else: return ["name", "gender", "ethnic", "DOB", "region"] so when I already have the name slot filled, instead of validate, the form should direct ask name1 and then gender and ethnic, etc, but the form still trying to validate the name slot which cause the wrong logic I don’t think my user case is hairy, it’s a very simple logic and make sense to me, it works well all the time in rasa 1.x, but become so hard to achieve in rasa 2.0 I think what I’ll do is just find the 1.x SDK and compare old formaction and FormValidationAction, and revert the FormValidationAction function to 1.x formaction

Alright @JialiuXu I think I understand now. You can validate just the recently set slots if you follow the code of FormValidationAction: in validate(), it iterates only over the recent SlotSet events because only those are returned by tracker.slots_to_validate().

@SamS I’m still really confused about dynamic form behavior. Is there any examples of bots that use actions to fill multiple slots? The documentation doesn’t really lay out what that looks like. Thanks!

Hey @travelmail26 , I get you, this should be documented better. When you say: bots that use actions to fill multiple slots what exactly do you mean? A form that fills multiple slots – possibly some of them with mappings defined in the domain and some others added dynamically in a FormValidationAction? Or something else?

@SamS yes! and thanks for your quick response. It’s very helpful. So, I have a bot that asks two questions How long did you sleep? How would you describe your sleep? For a lot of reasons, I want to do this as a custom action and not the normal form slots, partly because I need an open ended response option (among others). The documentation doesn’t lay out how to ask successive questions to gather data in a custom action. I’d love to seen an example. Thanks!

Ah, I see! Well, as a matter of fact, custom actions are a tool that we give to folks with only the essential guidance , without many examples of how to accommodate specific conversational patterns. One reason for this is that custom actions are meant for advanced use cases and for advanced developers. This being said, to: I want to do this as a custom action and not the normal form slots I can only say: What if I told you that forms were also just custom actions? :wink: I’m talking about FormAction and FormValidationAction in Rasa SDK . These custom actions take care of forms and you can tweak them to achieve your own form behaviour :slight_smile:

@SamS Got it. I guess id like help for a few reasons. 1. I did try with the conventional Forms/Slots method and ran into a bunch of issues. I left some questions on the forum and never heard back. 2. I’d like greater control over my options, so when I run into a pre-built feature that needs an exception, I can at least code my own way to a solution. So, if its not too much trouble, id really love to see an example. i’d like to use Rasa for my project and the community is still a big reason im trying to stick with it despite the complications :). Thanks

I get you. I left some questions on the forum and never heard back. Ideally, that shouldn’t happen… Feel free to point me towards any which are still unanswered and really relevant to this thread. I’d like greater control over my options, so when I run into a pre-built feature that needs an exception, I can at least code my own way to a solution. So, if its not too much trouble, id really love to see an example. It’s still not entirely clear to me what kind of example you imagine. Could you be more specific? To trigger your action instead of the default form, just give your action the same name as the form’s name (e.g. restaurant_form). If you want to achieve form behaviour with a custom action, look at FormAction in the Rasa SDK code. Rasa is an open-source project and, ideally, the code should serve as an additional source (to complement the docs, which will never be exhaustive). If the code is unclear or not well documented, then let’s work on it, but we’ll never be able to describe in the docs the many ways in which each piece of code can be tweaked…

@SamS Thanks for the reply! I posted an question here and here and it was (eventually) responded to but didn’t really help me with an example. i’ve pasted it here if it helps. The main thing I need help with is how to code the action.py so that it asks sequential questions and then takes in any text input: I’ve been having difficulty coming up with a custom action to fill slots with open ended texts (after reading all the documentation and looking at the working examples on github). Below is my code. I’d really like some help. Here, I want the bot to ask two questions in order (and I would like it to do it in custom actions). Would you like to talk about your sleep? How would you describe your sleep? I want the second question to capture any text, no matter how long, and return it in a variable that I can dump in a spreadsheet later. I’m really confused how I ask both questions in the action.py file. The form is triggered by this intent in the NLU - intent: sleep_log examples: | - I'd like to log my sleep The domain of the form is: responses: utter_confirm_sleep: - text: Do you want to talk about how you slept? forms: sleep_form: sleep_confirm: - type: from_intent intent: affirm value: True - type: from_intent intent: deny value: False - type: from_intent intent: inform value: True And, STORIES: - story: sleep happy path steps: - intent: sleep_log - action: utter_confirm_sleep - intent: affirm - action: sleep_form - active_loop: sleep_form ACTIONS class ValidateSleep(FormValidationAction): print ("sleep form triggered") def name(self) -> Text: print ('validation run sleep') return "validate_sleep_form" async def validate_sleep_confirm( self, value: Text, dispatcher: CollectingDispatcher, tracker: Tracker, domain: Dict[Text, Any], ) -> Dict[Text, Any]: if value: print ('true value of sleep confirmed') return {"sleep_confirm": True} else: print ('false value sleep confirmed') return {"sleep_confirm": False } async def required_slots( self, slots_mapped_in_domain: List[Text], dispatcher: "CollectingDispatcher", tracker: "Tracker", domain: "DomainDict", ) -> Optional[List[Text]]: required_slots = slots_mapped_in_domain + ["sleep_description"] print ('required slot triggered') return required_slots async def extract_sleep_description( self, dispatcher: CollectingDispatcher, tracker: Tracker, domain: Dict ) -> Dict[Text, Any]: text_of_last_user_message = tracker.latest_message.get("text") sleep_description = "slept" in text_of_last_user_message dispatcher.utter_message(text="please describe your sleep") return {"sleep_description": sleep_description} Please let me know how I can ma…

Issue with handling conditional slot logic and validations in the same action in Rasa 2.0

Rasa Open Source

SamS (Sam Sucik) March 15, 2021, 8:03am 57

@travelmail26 have you tried removing the NLU fallback classifier (or setting the threshold extremely low), as I suggested above?

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Issue with handling conditional slot logic and validations in the same action in Rasa 2.0

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