Fill slots in other parts of utterance templates than text

[erohmensing]

Right now, we only fill the {slot} format of utterance templates in the - text attribute of utterance templates. We could extend this to also fill keywords in other templates, e.g. "image" and "buttons", so that someone can use kwargs to fill them dynamically from their actions code.

Example use case:
https://forum.rasa.com/t/how-to-send-image-url-to-templates-dynamically/11074

[RanaMostafaAbdElMohsen]

Hey @erohmensing ,
I began investigating the issue.
What I concluded so far from slots.py there are slot formats for type names below :

- text
- float
- boolean
- List
- unfeaturized
- categorical

I believe what is required here to extend for - images and - buttons as well, correct?

[erohmensing]

Hi @RanaMostafaAbdElMohsen! This isn't about slot types, but rather about which utterance fields get filled. The logic happens here:

rasa/rasa/core/nlg/template.py

Line 114 in ea76c3d

text = re.sub(r"{([^\n]+?)}", r"{0[\1]}", template["text"])

As you can see, only the text field of the template is getting updated with slot values. However, templates can also have images, buttons, quick_replies, attachment, and custom fields (custom will be a dict that has anything in it)

A template is a dictionary, where its keys are text, etc -- in order to merge this PR, we would make sure it did that replacing in every key, value pair of the template. Then for custom, we would have to go one step further and make sure that every key, value within the custom dict has replacement too (probably recursively)

Does that help? I promise I've made it sound much more complicated than it probably would be :)

[RanaMostafaAbdElMohsen]

Does that help? I promise I've made it sound much more complicated than it probably would be :)

Yes it helped :) Thanks @erohmensing

[akelad]

@RanaMostafaAbdElMohsen any progress on this yet?

[RanaMostafaAbdElMohsen]

Hi @akelad ,
I was working on resolving an issue and was recently resolved. Currently, I am investigating this issue and hopefully there will be a progress in it soon.

[RanaMostafaAbdElMohsen]

Hi @erohmensing ,
I have made a PR initially for filling slot utterance templates for image. Can you please advise me if I am on right track to support other fields ?

[erohmensing]

closed in #4077 and #4079 -- thanks guys!