Unable to understand the exception error for custom action

Rasa Open Source
1

I’m still playing around with Rasa, so please let me know if I’m doing something very obviously wrong.

I’m trying out the use case where a user expresses an interest in one slot/entity but then in the conversation later, changes interest to another slot. Here’s the domain file that I’m trying to work with -

domain.yml

intents:
  - interested
  - switch_interest

entities:
  - foo

slots:
  foo:
    type: categorical
    values:
    - A
    - B
    - C

actions:
- utter_confirm_interest
- custom_switch_interest

templates:
  utter_confirm_interest:
  - text: "You are interested in {foo}"

I understand that simply using slots itself I should be able to update the slot through the conversation. But I wanted to use a custom action to update the slot and respond via the custom action (dispatcher).

Here’s my action.py: from future import absolute_import from future import division from future import unicode_literals

from rasa_core_sdk import Action
from rasa_core_sdk.events import SlotSet

import requests

# Update slot for the alternative foo
class switchInterest(Action):
	def name(self):
		return 'custom_switch_interest'

	def run(self, dispatcher, tracker, domain):
		new_foo = tracker.get_slot('foo')
		response = """Okay, switching foo to {}.""".format(new_foo)
						
		dispatcher.utter_message(response)
		return [SlotSet('foo',new_foo)]

Upon getting to the custom action however, I’m getting the following error -

ERROR rasa.core.processor - Encountered an exception while running action 'custom_switch_interest'. Bot will continue, but the actions events are lost. Make sure to fix the exception in your custom code.

The reason I wanted to do this approach is for a later use case where as the business, I can suggest a “foo”: “bar” and the user would only need to say Yes/No for me to update the “foo” to “bar” via the same or through another custom action. Any thoughts on both these use cases would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

2

See the action logs for helpful information. It will show the Exception that led to the error message.

Edit: FYI, did you know about python’s f-strings? Relatively new feature

Simpler and easier readable than .format(…)

Edit2: Triple Quote strings are used for docstrings in python. Rather use single single- or double quotes for strings.

3

@IgNoRaNt23 Thanks for your reply! Could you share how to view action logs? When I run rasa run actions, it shows me the endpoint running as

2019-09-10 10:04:25 INFO     rasa_sdk.endpoint  - Starting action endpoint server...
/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/rasa_core_sdk/__init__.py:12: UserWarning: The 'rasa_core_sdk' package has been renamed. You should change your imports to use 'rasa_sdk' instead.
  UserWarning,
2019-09-10 10:04:25 INFO     rasa_sdk.executor  - Registered function for 'custom_switch_interest'.
2019-09-10 10:04:25 INFO     rasa_sdk.endpoint  - Action endpoint is up and running. on ('0.0.0.0', 5055)

However, the endpoint that I had configured in endpoints.yml was

action_endpoint:
  url: "http://localhost:3000/rasa-test"

Could you help? Much appreciated. I’ll make the changes and use f-string and single quotes in the actions.py as you suggested.

4

Guess your problem is the wrong endpoint in that case. Anyway this is how I start my action server

rasa run actions \
    -vv \ #debug flag, gives lots of output
    -p $actions_port \ # in your case actions_port=3000
    --actions actions \
    > logs/actions.log 2>&1 &

And this is for the CLI

rasa shell \
    --model models/ \
    --endpoints endpoints.yml \
    --log-file logs/botrun.log \
    -vv \ #again debug flag
    -p $rasa_port

And this is endpoints.yml

action_endpoint:
url: http://localhost:$actions_port/webhook
1 Like
5

This is fantastic! Thank you so much Heiner S! It worked for me!

6

Also another question if you don’t mind.

When I tried rasa shell as you have in the CLI portion of your solution, upon entering the first user utterance, the shell quits and goes back to the command line.

I used rasa interactive to get the custom action working, but was just curious if I can use the regular rasa shell to work.

7

Strange, maybe look into the logfile (logs/botrun.log if you CPed everything) and see if you find any related messages

8

Will try this today and confirm. Thanks @IgNoRaNt23!