Utter message while validating

Rasa Open Source
1

I’m facing some issues while validating some data. I’m building a “market” in which you ask for a product and a quantity with it’s units ( kg for example). In the validation I check an API so i can ensure that the given units goes with the product, so nobody could ask for 2 liters of fish, which makes no sense.

The problem here is that while fetching the data from the API I want to utter a message saying something like: Searching… But, if I try dispatcher.utter_message it waits til the validation is over to utter the message. Is there any way to solve this? Because the API calls are too slow.

Thx in advance.

2

@palagonKevo are you able to validate and fetch the data from API?

3

Yes, this is the expected behavior.

All events happen after the whole custom action finishes running.

The following code will do nothing for 5 seconds and utter A then B right after it:

dispatcher.utter_message('A')
time.sleep(5)
dispatcher.utter_message('B')

What you could do is implement the required_slots() method, and if it’s the turn of that slot, you can dispatch the message before return, and the validate() method will take place after that.

4

The problem here is that I only need to dispatch the message if a condition is met, so, it makes no sense to ask the bot to say a phrase at the beginning of the validation, it must be while validating, at least to let the user know that the chatbot is thinking.

5

If that’s the case then okay. I don’t know what you’re doing so I can’t guess what makes sense or not in your case.

But can’t you check for that condition in the required_slots() method?

Because again, dispatching before the end of the function is not an option.

6

Was your issue solved?

If yes, please share the solution.

7

No solution found yet. Idk how to solve it, I just avoided it by improving the speed of the data extraction of the db.

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