Passing information from the client to Composer bot

I am trying to post a custom event via Direct Line to my Composer-based bot.

I found a page for the Bot Framework SDK v3 showing how to send a custom activity, however this page is not present in the v4 docs.

This is my code, I’m utilising the Web Chat control:

 var dl = window.WebChat.createDirectLine({
        token: '[token]'
    });
    
    window.WebChat.renderWebChat(
        {
            directLine: dl,
            userID: 'YOUR_USER_ID',
            username: 'Web Chat User',
            locale: 'en-US',
            botAvatarInitials: 'WC',
            userAvatarInitials: 'WW'
        },
        document.getElementById('webchat')
    );

    window.setTimeout(function () {
        dl.postActivity({ type: "event", value: "hello", from: { id: "me" }, name: "PageLoaded" })
            .subscribe(id => console.log("success"));
    }, 5000);

I have a 5 second delay before posting the activity to make sure everything loads.

This works in as much as that when the activity is posted, I get my welcome text back from the bot, however the custom event is never fired on the Composer side.

I created the event in Composer by

1. Adding a new Trigger
2. Selected Custom events and provided the name PageLoaded
3. Added “Send a response” to say “Got page loaded event”

I need to know how to be able to pull the value from the event, in this case the value “hello”.

[benjaminsommerfeld]

@knightmeister Maybe this can help you, we are sending an activity event from Webchat to Composer like this:

        const store = window.WebChat.createStore({}, ({ dispatch }) => next => action => {
            if (action.type === 'DIRECT_LINE/CONNECT_FULFILLED') {
                dispatch({
                    type: 'WEB_CHAT/SEND_EVENT',
                    payload: {
                        name: 'loginevent',
                        value: { prename: 'Stefan', surname:'Lauf' }
                    }
                });
            }

            return next(action);
        });

window.WebChat.renderWebChat( { directLine: window.WebChat.createDirectLine({ token }), store }, document.getElementById(‘webchat’) );

—> when loading this webchat html page, it directly sends the “loginevent” in store.

The webchat code is inspired by this sample: https://github.com/microsoft/BotFramework-WebChat/tree/master/samples/04.api/a.welcome-event

The composer then receives it with an “Activity Event” trigger

This way it works for us. Hope this can help you.

[knightmeister]

Many thanks @benjaminsommerfeld, this allowed me to determine where I was wrong. My JavaScript works, but the issue was I was using a dialog event, rather than an activity event.