I have an Action where the user can set values of different parameters. Currently this is implemented something like this, and it works well:
Now I want to make the conversation less robot-like and more flexible, so I would like to allow users to set or change more than one value at a time. They should be able to say things like
Change the Interest Rate to 4% and the Term to 15 years.
or
Change the Interest Rate to 4%, the Term to 15 years, and the Years to Average Principal to 3.
There are a couple of ways to do this, but none of them are great, and all of them have issues of some sort when you try to scale them. (So they might work well for two or three parameters entered, but they probably won't work well for more than that.)
(It is worth noting, just for reference, that the Assistant itself has only recently started accepting more than one instruction at a time. But it only handles two, and this doesn't work for all commands.)
Add phrases with additional parameters
With this solution, you would supplement the phrases you have that collect one parameter with a similar set of phrases that collect two parameters. And then another set that also collect three parameters. You should be able to do these all as a single Intent and, in your fulfillment, determine which ones have been set.
It might look something like this:
That looks like it starts getting complicated, doesn't it? You need to list each combination of absolute values and percentages. If you have other types, you need to include each of those combinations as well. That starts getting unwieldy for 3 possible parameters, and certainly is above that. You also run the risk that it might get confused about which parameter should be set with which value (I haven't tested this - it is a theoretical concern).
Add an optional continuation phrase and handle that recursively
You can also treat this as the user saying "set a value, and then do something else" and treat the "do something else" part as another statement made to Dialogflow. The Intent might look something like this:
You can implement the "another statement made to Dialogflow" using the Dialogflow API. With Dialogflow V1, you'd use the Query endpoint. With Dialogflow V2, you'd use the detectIntent endpoint. In either case, you'd send the additional part of the query (if the user said something) and would get back the results from that. You'd add the resulting message from the call to the message from setting the current set of values and send the whole thing back.
As a recursive call, however, this does take up time. Since the initial call to Dialogflow really needs to be answered within 5 seconds, every additional call to Dialogflow (and then to your fulfillment) needs to be handled as quickly as possible. But even so, you probably won't be able to handle more than 2 or 3 of these before things time out on the front end.
It also runs the risk (or benefit) that other intents besides the edit.attribute Intent might be called in the "additional" portion. If you want to limit the risk of this, you could set a context to make sure that only Intents that have that incoming context would be called.
Summary
This really isn't an easy problem to solve. On one hand, you have the problem of having to list out every combination. On the other hand, recursion takes time, and you don't have a lot of time to process everything. In both cases, there is a real possibility of the phrase being understood incorrectly and you'll need to figure out error handling in the case where some values have been changed and others haven't.
You may need to experiment a lot, and the results may still not be satisfactory.
You can implement the "another statement made to Dialogflow" using the
Dialogflow API. With Dialogflow V1, you'd use the Query endpoint.
With Dialogflow V2, you'd use the detectIntent endpoint. In either
case, you'd send the additional part of the query (if the user said
something) and would get back the results from that. You'd add the
resulting message from the call to the message from setting the
current set of values and send the whole thing back.
As a recursive call, however, this does take up time. Since the
initial call to Dialogflow really needs to be answered within 5
seconds, every additional call to Dialogflow (and then to your
fulfillment) needs to be handled as quickly as possible. But even so,
you probably won't be able to handle more than 2 or 3 of these before
things time out on the front end.
The first thing that came to mind after reading those two paragraphs was batch requests.
A batch request allows a client application to pack multiple API calls into a single HTTP request (this batching technique is also known as a multi-part request).
Many Google APIs support a batch endpoint and I was able to verify that DialogFlow has a batch endpoint by checking its API Discovery document. This batch endpoint is not formerly documented in DialogFlow's API reference but you can leverage the documentation of other APIs (like this one) to get a feel for how it works. This link should also be instructive now that the global batch endpoint is no longer supported.
Assuming your queries are independent (ie. they don't rely on the results of other queries) you should be able to use a batch request to fetch more data.
Related
is there any possibility to get exact time spent on a certain level in a game via firebase analytics? Thank you so much 🙏
I tried to use logEvents.
The best way to do so would be measuring the time on the level within your codebase, then have a very dedicated event for level completion, in which you would pass the time spent on the level.
Let's get to details. I will use Kotlin as an example, but it should be obvious what I'm doing here and you can see more language examples here.
firebaseAnalytics.setUserProperty("user_id", userId)
firebaseAnalytics.logEvent("level_completed") {
param("name", levelName)
param("difficulty", difficulty)
param("subscription_status", subscriptionStatus)
param("minutes", minutesSpentOnLevel)
param("score", score)
}
Now see how I have a bunch of parameters with the event? These parameters are important since they will allow you to conduct a more thorough and robust analysis later on, answer more questions. Like, Hey, what is the most difficult level? Do people still have troubles on it when the game difficulty is lower? How many times has this level been rage-quit or lost (for that you'd likely need a level_started event). What about our paid players, are they having similar troubles on this level as well? How many people have ragequit the game on this level and never played again? That would likely be easier answer with sql at this point, taking the latest value of the level name for the level_started, grouped by the user_id. Or, you could also have levelName as a UserProperty as well as the EventProperty, then it would be somewhat trivial to answer in the default analytics interface.
Note that you're limited in the number of event parameters you can send per event. The total number of unique parameter names is limited too. As well as the number of unique event names you're allowed to have. In our case, the event name would be level_completed. See the limits here.
Because of those limitations, it's important to name your event properties in somewhat generic way so that you would be able to efficiently reuse them elsewhere. For this reason, I named minutes and not something like minutes_spent_on_the_level. You could then reuse this property to send the minutes the player spent actively playing, minutes the player spent idling, minutes the player spent on any info page, minutes they spent choosing their upgrades, etc. Same idea about having name property rather than level_name. Could as well be id.
You need to carefully and thoughtfully stuff your event with event properties. I normally have a wrapper around the firebase sdk, in which I would enrich events with dimensions that I always want to be there, like the user_id or subscription_status to not have to add them manually every time I send an event. I also usually have some more adequate logging there Firebase Analytics default logging is completely awful. I also have some sanitizing there, lowercasing all values unless I'm passing something case-sensitive like base64 values, making sure I don't have double spaces (so replacing \s+ with " " (space)), maybe also adding the user's local timestamp as another parameter. The latter is very helpful to indicate time-cheating users, especially if your game is an idler.
Good. We're halfway there :) Bear with me.
Now You need to go to firebase and register your eps (event parameters) into cds (custom dimensions and metrics). If you don't register your eps, they won't be counted towards the global cd limit count (it's about 50 custom dimensions and 50 custom metrics). You register the cds in the Custom Definitions section of FB.
Now you need to know whether this is a dimension or a metric, as well as the scope of your dimension. It's much easier than it sounds. The rule of thumb is: if you want to be able to run mathematical aggregation functions on your dimension, then it's a metric. Otherwise - it's a dimension. So:
firebaseAnalytics.setUserProperty("user_id", userId) <-- dimension
param("name", levelName) <-- dimension
param("difficulty", difficulty) <-- dimension (or can be a metric, depends)
param("subscription_status", subscriptionStatus) <-- dimension (can be a metric too, but even less likely)
param("minutes", minutesSpentOnLevel) <-- metric
param("score", score) <-- metric
Now another important thing to understand is the scope. Because Firebase and GA4 are still, essentially just in Beta being actively worked on, you only have user or hit scope for the dimensions and only hit for the metrics. The scope basically just indicates how the value persists. In my example, we only need the user_id as a user-scoped cd. Because user_id is the user-level dimension, it is set separately form the logEvent function. Although I suspect you can do it there too. Haven't tried tho.
Now, we're almost there.
Finally, you don't want to use Firebase to look at your data. It's horrible at data presentation. It's good at debugging though. Cuz that's what it was intended for initially. Because of how horrible it is, it's always advised to link it to GA4. Now GA4 will allow you to look at the Firebase values much more efficiently. Note that you will likely need to re-register your custom dimensions from Firebase in GA4. Because GA4 is capable of getting multiple data streams, of which firebase would be just one data source. But GA4's CDs limits are very close to Firebase's. Ok, let's be frank. GA4's data model is almost exactly copied from that of Firebase's. But GA4 has a much better analytics capabilities.
Good, you've moved to GA4. Now, GA4 is a very raw not-officially-beta product as well as Firebase Analytics. Because of that, it's advised to first change your data retention to 12 months and only use the explorer for analysis, pretty much ignoring the pre-generated reports. They are just not very reliable at this point.
Finally, you may find it easier to just use SQL to get your analysis done. For that, you can easily copy your data from GA4 to a sandbox instance of BQ. It's very easy to do.This is the best, most reliable known method of using GA4 at this moment. I mean, advanced analysts do the export into BQ, then ETL the data from BQ into a proper storage like Snowflake or even s3, or Aurora, or whatever you prefer and then on top of that, use a proper BI tool like Looker, PowerBI, Tableau, etc. A lot of people just stay in BQ though, it's fine. Lots of BI tools have BQ connectors, it's just BQ gets expensive quickly if you do a lot of analysis.
Whew, I hope you'll enjoy analyzing your game's data. Data-driven decisions rock in games. Well... They rock everywhere, to be honest.
As I am not sure I stated the question very well originally, I am restating it to see if there is a better response.
I have a problem with how best to manage a specific kind collection with a RESTful API. To help illustrate the issue I have I will use an simple artificial example. Lets call it the 'Raffle Ticket Selector'. For this question I am only interested in how to perform one function.
I have a collection of unpurchased raffle tickets (raffleTickets). Each with a unique Raffle Number along with other information.
I need to be able to take an identified number of tickets (numTickets) from the raffleTickets collection without uniquely selecting them. The collection itself has a mechanism for random selection.
The result is that I am returned 5 unique tickets from the collection and the size of the collection is decreased by 5 as the 5 returned have been removed.
The quesition is, how do I do it in a RESTfull way?
I intuatively want to do METHOD .../raffelTickets?numTickets=5 but struggle with which HTTP Method to use
In answering; you are not allowed to suggest that I just PATCH/PUT a status change to effect a removal by marking them taken. It must result an actual change in the cardanality of the collection.
Note: Calling the method twice will return a different result set every time and will always alter the collection on which it is performed (unless it is empty!)
So what method should I use? PUT? POST? DELETE? PATCH? Identpotent restrictions would seem to only leave me with POST and PATCH neither of which feels ideal to me. Or perhaps there is another way of providing the overall behavior that is considered the correct approach.
I am really interested to know what is best practice and understand why.
Cheers
Original Post on which the first response was based:
I have a pool of a given item which is to be managed with a RESTful API. Now adding items to the pool is not an issue but how to I take items from the pool? Is it also a POST or is it a DELETE?
Lets say it is a pool of random numbers and I want to retrieve a variable number of items in a single method call.
I have two scenarios:
I am not checking them out as once taken they will not be returned to the pool.
I only want to check them out and they effectively remain part of the pool but have a status altered to 'inUse'
The important thing in each case is I do not care which items I get, I just want N of them.
What is considered the RESTful way performing each of the two actions on the pool? I have an opinion on the second option but I dither on the former so I am interested in your thoughts for both so I better understand the thought pattern
Thanks
Not sure if I understood well your question. It will mostly depend on the way you developed the API side of your REST communication.
In a generic solution, you would use DELETE to take items out of a list. However, if you just want to PARTIALY update the items, you could use PATCH instead of POST or PUT.
Give this a look: http://restcookbook.com/HTTP%20Methods/patch/
I'm using the Asana REST API to iterate over workspaces, projects, and tasks. After I achieved the initial crawl over the data, I was surprised to see that I only retrieved the top-level tasks. Since I am required to provide the workspace and project information, I was hoping not to have to recurse any deeper. It appears that I can recurse on a single task with the \subtasks endpoint and re-query... wash/rinse/repeat... but that amounts to a potentially massive number of REST calls (one for each subtask to see if they, in turn, have subtasks to query - and so on).
I can partially mitigate this by adding to the opt_fields query parameter something like:
&opt_fields=subtasks,subtasks.subtasks
However, this doesn't scale well. It means I have to elongate the query for each layer of depth. I suppose I could say "don't put tasks deeper than x layers deep" - but that seems to fly in the face of Asana's functionality and design. Also, since I need lots of other properties, it requires me to make a secondary query for each node in the hierarchy to gather those. Ugh.
I can use the path method to try to mitigate this a bit:
&opt_fields=(this|subtasks).(id|name|etc...)
but again, I have to do this for every layer of depth. That's impractical.
There's documentation about this great REPEATER + operator. Supposedly it would work like this:
&opt_fields=this.subtasks+.name
That is supposed to apply to ALL subtasks anywhere in the hierarchy. In practice, this is completely broken, and the REST API chokes and returns only the ids of the top-level tasks. :( Apparently their documentation is just wrong here.
The only method that seems remotely functional (if not practical) is to iterate first on the top-level tasks, being sure to include opt_fields=subtasks. Whenever this is a non-empty array, I would need to recurse on that task, query for its subtasks, and continue in that manner, until I reach a null subtasks array. This could be of arbitrary depth. In practice, the first REST call yields me (hopefully) the largest number of tasks, so the individual recursion may be mitigated by real data... but it's a heck of an assumption.
I also noticed that the limit parameter applied ONLY to the top-level tasks. If I choose to expand the subtasks, say. I could get a thousand tasks back instead of 100. The call could timeout if the data is too large. The safest thing to do would be to only request the ids of subtasks until recursion, and as always, ask for all the desired top-level properties at that time.
All of this seems incredibly wasteful - what I really want is a flat list of tasks which include the parent.id and possibly a list of subtasks.id - but I don't want to query for them hierarchically. I also want to page my queries with rational data sizes in mind. I'd like to get 100 tasks at a time until Asana runs out - but that doesn't seem possible, since the limit only applies to top-level items.
Unfortunately the repeater didn't solve my problem, since it just doesn't work. What are other people doing to solve this problem? And, secondarily, can anyone with intimate Asana insight provide any hope of getting a better way to query?
While I'm at it, a suggested way to design this: the task endpoint should not require workspace or project predicate. I should be able to filter by them, but not be required to. I am limited to 100 objects already, why force me to filter unnecessarily? In the same vein - navigating the hierarchy of Asana seems an unnecessary tax for clients who are not Asana (and possibly even the Asana UI itself).
Any ideas or insights out there?
Have you ensured that the + you send is URL-encoded? Whatever library you are using should usually handle this (which language are you using, btw? We have some first-party client libraries available)
Try &opt_fields=this.subtasks%2B.name if you're creating the URL manually, or (better yet) use a library that correctly encodes URL query parameters.
I'm creating v2 of an existing RESTful web api.
The responses are JSON lists of objects, roughly in the form:
[
{
name1=value1,
name2=value2,
},
{
name1=value3,
name2=value4,
}
]
One problem we've observed with v1 is that some clients will access fields by integer position, instead of by name. This means that if we decide to add fields to the response (which we had originally considered a compatibility-preserving change), then some of our client's code breaks, unless we add the fields at the end. Even then, other clients code breaks anyway, because they will fail in some way when they encounter an unexpected attribute name.
To counter this in v2, we are considering randomly reordering the fields in every response. This will force clients to index fields by name instead of by position.
Additionally, we are considering adding a randomly-named field to every response. This will force clients to ignore fields they don't recognize.
While this sounds somewhat barmy, it does have the advantage that we will be able to add new fields, safe in the knowledge that this isn't breaking any clients. This means we can issue compatible updates to v2.1, v2.3, etc at the same URL, and that means we will only have to maintain & support a smaller number of API versions.
The alternative is to issue compatibility-breaking v3, v4, at new URLs, which means that we will have to maintain & support many incompatible API versions, which will stretch us that little bit thinner.
Is this a bad idea, and if so, why? Are there any other similar ideas I should think about?
Update: The first couple of responses are pointing out that if I document the issue (i.e. indicate in the docs that fields may be added or reordered) then I am no longer to blame if client code breaks when I subsequently add or reorder fields. Sadly I don't think this is an appropriate option for us: Many dozens of organisations rely on the functionality of our APIs for real-world transactions with substantial financial impact. These organisations are not technically oriented - and the resulting implementations at the client end cover the whole spectrum of technical proficiency. We already did document that fields may get added or reordered in the docs for v1, and that clearly didn't work, because now we're having to issue v2 because many clients, due to lack of time or experience or ability, still wrote code that breaks when we add new fields. If I were now to add fields to the interface, it breaks a dozen different company's interfaces to us, which means they (and us) are bleeding money every minute. If I were to refuse to revert the change or fix it, saying "They should have read the docs!", then I will soon be out of the job, and rightly so. We may attempt to educate the 'failing' partners, but this is doomed to fail as the problem gets larger every month as we continue to grow. My question is, can I systemically head the whole issue off at the pass, preventing this situation from ever arising, no matter what clients try to do? If the techniques I suggest would work, why shouldn't I use them? Why isn't everyone else using them?
If you want your media types to be "evolvable", make that point very clear in the documentation. Similarly, if the placement order of fields is not guaranteed, make that explicitly clear too. If you supply sample code for your API, make sure it does not rely on field ordering.
However, even assuming that you have to maintain different versions of your media types, you don't have to version the URI. REST gives you the ability to maintain the same version-agnostic URI but use HTTP content negotiation (via the Accept and Content-Type headers) to offer different payloads at the same URI.
Therefore any client that doesn't explicitly wish to accept your new v2/v3/etc encoding won't get it. By default, you can return the old v1 encoding with the original field ordering and all of those brittle client apps will work fine. However, new client developers will know (thanks to your documentation) to indicate via Accept that they are willing and able to see the new fields and they don't care about their order. Best of all, you can (and should) use the same URI throughout. Remember - different payloads like this are just different representations of the same underlying resource, so the URI should be the same.
I've decided to run with the described techniques, to the max. I haven't heard any objections to them that hold any water for me. Brian's answer, about re-using the same URI for different API versions, is a solid and much-appreciated complementary idea (with upvote), but I can't award it 'best answer' because it doesn't get to the core of my original question.
I am developing a Novell Identity Manager driver for Salesforce.com, and am trying to understand the Salesforce.com platform better.
I have had really good success to date. I can read pretty much arbitrary object classes out of SFDC, and create eDirectory objects for them, and what not. This is all done and working nicely. (Publisher Channel). Once I got Query events mapped out, most everything started working in the Publisher Channel.
I am now working on sending events back to SFDC (Subscriber channel) when changes occur in eDirectory.
I am using the upsert() function in the SOAP API, and with Novell Identity Manager, you basically build the SOAP doc, and can see the results as you build it. (You can do it in XSLT or you can use the various allowed tokens to build the document in DirXML Script. I am using DirXML Script which has been working well so far.).
The upshot of that comment is that I can build the SOAP document, see it, to be sure I get it right. Which is usually different than the Java/C++ approach that the sample code usually provides. Much more visual this way.
There are several things about upsert() that I do not entirely understand. I know how to blank a value, should I get that sort of event. Inside the <urn:sObjects> node, add a node like (assuming you get your namespaces declared already):
<urn1:fieldsToNull>FieldName</urn1:fieldsToNull>
I know how to add a value (AttrValue) to the attribute (FieldName), add a node like:
<FieldName>AttrValue</FieldName>
All this works and is pretty straight forward.
The question I have is, can a value in SFDC be multi-valued? In eDirectory, a multi valued attribute being changed, can happen two ways:
All values can be removed, and the new set re-added.
The single value removed can be sent as that sort of event (remove-value) or many values can be removed in one operation.
Looking at SFDC, I only ever see Multi-picklist attributes that seem to be stored in a single entry : or ; delimited. Is there another kind of multi valued attribute managed differently in SFDC? And if so, how would one manipulate it via the SOAP API?
I still have to decide if I want to map those multi-picklists to a single string, or a multi valued attribute of strings. First way is easier, second way is more useful... Hmmm... Choices...
Some references:
I have been using the page Sample SOAP messages to understand what the docs should look like.
Apex Explorer is a kicking tool for browsing the database and testing queries. Much like DBVisualizer does for JDBC connected databases. This would have been so much harder without it!
SoapUi is also required, and a lovely tool!
As far as I know there's no multi-value field other than multi-select picklists (and they map to semicolon-separated string). Generally platform encourages you to create a proper relationship with another (possibly new, custom) table if you're in need of having multiple values associated to your data.
Only other "unusual" thing I can think of is how the OwnerId field on certain objects (Case, Lead, maybe something else) can be used to point to User or Queue record. Looks weird when you are used to foreign key relationships from traditional databases. But this is not identical with what you're asking as there will be only one value at a time.
Of course you might be surpised sometimes with values you'll see in the database depending on the viewing user's locale (stuff like System Administrator profile becoming Systeembeheerder in Dutch). But this will be still a single value, translated on the fly just before the query results are sent back to you.
When I had to perform SOAP integration with SFDC, I've always used WSDL files and most of the time was fine with Java code generated out of them with Apache Axis. Hand-crafting the SOAP message yourself seems... wow, hardcore a bit. Are you sure you prefer visualisation of XML over the creation of classes, exceptions and all this stuff ready for use with one of several out-of-the-box integration methods? If they'll ever change the WSDL I need just to regenerate the classes from it; whereas changes to your SOAP message creation library might be painful...