Types of API Integrations Available on Our Bot

What are Integrations?

Integrations allow you to connect your IVA to external services to perform dynamic operations like fetching data, posting data, or performing some business logic over the collected entities from the IVA.

Types of Integrations

Our Conversation Studio tool supports two types of integrations. They are

Integrations via Code Step using Code Editor
Integrations via Static Step using Integrations Tab

Integrations via Code step using Code Editor

Code Step provides an option of Code Editor where you can write your custom python code to communicate with the external service and execute the business logic.

Code Step is a type of step which contains all the business logic to integrate a function.

Code Editor is a feature using which we can write our Python code and integration functions. The supported programming language is Python 3 and above. If any syntax errors or exceptions are raised by the main function, this will result in a Bot Break message.

Stages to add your APIs –

Initialize variables to use the collected information in entities
Pass the information to the API
Fetch the values back from API
Log the details using logger package
Change the final_response
Run the code
Provide Sample Output
Create an Output Step to display the output on the bot

Integrations via Static Step using Integrations Tab

Static Step provides an option for integrations. In this mode of integration, you provide an API URL to which the entity data will be passed as a POST request with a JSON payload. The API URL is then expected to return the bot response in a JSON format.

Choosing the Type of Integration

It is important to choose the right type of integration for your use case as this will increase the speed of shipping the IVA and also help in long-term maintainability.

When to use Code Steps

In most cases, you should be using Code Step’s Code Editor. Here are some sample scenarios:

Integrating with APIs from external providers where they have their own request and response formats
Performing business logic validations or calculations on the collected entities
Posting or fetching data from external data stores or services
OTP verification

When to use Static Step Integrations

This should only be used in very complex cases where a middleware service needs to be built or the code is too complicated. Some scenarios where you should be using the API integrations are:

Having Custom authentication and data storage requirements
Integrating with APIs from external providers where they understand our request and response formats