✨ Access nlu properties in CoreRequest

[rubenaeg]

Proposed Changes

This PR modifies the JovoInputBuilder to accept an input object, analogous to JovoInput. This allows inheriting request classes to easily extend the getInput() function, as seen in CoreRequest. Furthermore, CoreRequest.prototype.getIntents() and CoreRequest.prototype.getEntities() allow access to properties in input.nlu.

Types of Changes

• Bug fix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)
• Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)

Checklist

• My code follows the code style of this project
• My change requires a change to the documentation
• I have updated the documentation accordingly
• I have added tests to cover my changes
• All new and existing tests passed

[rubenaeg]

Oh, I was just wondering, would it make sense to change getEntities() (and getIntents() for that matter as well) to merge the properties instead of using logical or ||?

[jankoenig]

Could you explain a bit further what this is doing here? Thanks!

[rubenaeg]

So the idea behind this was that you can easily extend this.$input by allowing inheriting request classes to build upon the JovoInputBuilder. Here we get the input built in JovoRequest and add the nlu property, so you can access this.$input.nlu in the handler.

[jankoenig]

Thank you. I'm still not sure if I get it, to be honest. A bit confused why specifically nlu needs to be set in this method and why we're not setting any other property. What is a use case here?

Could the reasoning be commented or documented somewhere? i think otherwise it could happen that we don't know why this is there if we look at the code in a few months

[rubenaeg]

Okay so I guess this could be seen as being redundant, the original idea was to access the nlu properties in the handler, because if intents/entities were set in input.nlu, you had no way of accessing it with this.$input, but since this PR allows accessing them through getIntent() and getEntities() it can be removed.

[rmtuckerphx]

@rubenaeg How do we access other properties that we might add to $input.nlu?
This could be an output object with messages if the SLU/NLU provides dialog management or messages.

[rubenaeg]

Well I now removed the code, but you can see in the code above how you could add properties to the input object that is returned by getInput(). @jankoenig do you need more input on this PR? I can write some documentation if you'd like, something like "Extending the Input object", where I could also cover ambient declarations...