Allow dots in $variable names and provide a way to override or replace the ContextVariables class

We’re exploring integrating SK with the Bot Framework SDK’s as a way to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for the creation of chat bots. SK seems like a perfect fit but one rough edge is around SK manages memory. The Bot Framework has a very rich state management system that breaks memory down into scopes. These scopes are extensible but the 3 default scopes that are relevant here are:

• conversation - variables are automatically remembered on a per conversation basis so if the bot is being used in 4 different chats there are 4 completely separate sets of variables being remembered.
• user - variables are automatically remembered for each user across all their conversations. So if there are 10 of us in a chat we each have a private set of user variables that are the same across all 4 chats I’m in with the bot.
• temp - variables are transient and only remembered for the turn. This more closely matches the current working memory for SK.
• activity - a pseudo memory scope for referencing properties off the received activity.

To create the best developer experience for our community it would be great if developers could just reference these scoped bags of state directly from the prompt; for example {{$user.name}} could reference the name of the current user, {{$activity.text}} could refence the text of the user massage the bot received, and {{$conversation.workItems}} could reference a list of work items being tracked by the bot.

The alternative is to make the developer manually copy every bot state variable they wish to reference in their prompts to working memory (ContextVariables) before they call into SK. That obviously would work but is a less then ideal developer experience.

To make SK “Bot Framework State Aware” I think 2 features would be needed:

1. We would need to relax the requirement to not include dots in $variable names.
2. We need some way of either replacing the ContextVariables class used by SK (make it an interface and include a clone() method) or let us inherit from and override the property getters and setters…

To go along with this on the Bot Framework side of things I would propose we map flat references like {{$history}} to our temp scope so we would turn that into {{$temp.history}} in our implementation of ContextVariables.

[evchaki]

@Stevenic, thanks again for the great feedback on this. I made sure we are tracking it with the project team.

[dluc]

thanks @Stevenic - we’re looking into this area while working on increasing the pipeline flexibility. The change should be straightforward, but we just need to make sure it doesn’t conflict with the bigger picture. We’ll provide updates soon