No definition in code for custom slots

(update: this is related to #114 )

One of the things that my team really likes about the alexa-app kit vs the official alexa-sdk, is that the schema and utterances are packaged right along with the code, so it’s a rather attractive, declarative sort of style.

We just noticed as we were working out good ways to deploy things, that there is a lack of any kind of definition for custom slot data.

This is something that I would be interested in working on, if the maintainers would be interested in it, but I’d also like to discuss what we would think would be the best way to handle doing it would be.

I think what we are thinking about doing, since Amazon is lacking any official way to update the “Interaction Model” page, is writing some code to automatically pull the schema, utterances, and slot definitions from the skill code, and then use curl or node or something to automatically push it to the Interaction Model page. (or at least generate some text files that we can copy/paste from in the meantime)

So, I’m thinking that we could define slots as objects or strings (to keep compatibility), if object of form

slots: {
    startDate: { type: 'AMAZON.DATE', },
    subject: { type: 'SUBJECTS', examples: [ 'discuss code', 'code design', 'implementation meeting', 'one-on-one meeting', 'all-hands meeting', 'meeting with boss', .... ] },
}

and then have slots() output something like:

slotName
(line-separated examples)
(blank line)
slotName2
(line-separated examples)
(blank line)
...

Also considering that we might want (a) function(s) that would return the schema, slots, and utterances as javascript objects, so that we can parse them directly from our build/deployment system.

What do the people with more experience with the app kit suggest?

[rickwargo]

I have implemented this already - just trying to find the time to create a PR. I may have some time this weekend.

[dblock]

Closed via https://github.com/alexa-js/alexa-app/pull/275, please try it out!