[Feature request] access handler response in middleware

[tao1]

Hello,

I want to integrate chatbase to my dialogflow bot. Notice I use actions-on-google version 2.1.3. Today I can use middleware to intercept requests but not responses forged by my intent handlers. It would be very convenient to send bot responses to chatbase in generic way.

Kind regards,

Laurent.

[marionfi]

+1

[meelie]

+1

[igilham]

I agree. It would be useful to insert middleware before the response is returned.

[hyzhak]

👍 yes, we should have middlewares which could run no only "before calling the intent handler", but also "after calling the intent handler."

[afirstenberg]

There are two locations where it would be interesting to hook in. Before a response is set (to either add something standard common for multiple Intents, or to have the handlers set values and have the response come from a single function) and after it is sent (to log the interaction to Chatbase, Dashbot, or similar).

[Canain]

We have talked about creating a preware and postware system similar to middlewares right now.

Will need to figure out the exact details, but ideally it can cover most use cases and intercept requests to modify them coming in and intercept responses coming out.

[igilham]

This came up again for my team recently. We want a hook to perform analytics reporting after handling the intent but before returning the response. The postware idea would make this easy.

It might be worth looking at the Alexa SDK for inspiration. They already support pre- and post- intent handling interceptors, and a more scalable intent handler mechanism.

[MatheusAnciloto]

Any updates on this issue?

[Fleker]

It has not been something that I've been looking at. Any such feature would also be mirrored in the @assistant/conversation library as well.

You can accomplish something similar to what is done in the dialogflow-session-entities-plugin manually.

  send() {
    const responseBody = this.conv.serialize() as ResponseBody
    const convBody = this.conv.body as GoogleCloudDialogflowV2WebhookRequest
    responseBody.sessionEntityTypes = this.entities.map(entity => {
      entity.name = `${convBody.session}/entityTypes/${entity.name}`
      return entity
    })
    this.conv.json(responseBody)
  }

I realize a postware method would be easier, but want to make sure I collect enough use-cases so a final library API is suitably flexible. (And whether a preware makes sense)