Loading .transcript from disk does not render the conversation in the chat control

[cwhitten]

Opening a transcript from File -> Open Transcripts works as intended.

I think something has possibly gone wrong with .transcript generation. I create a fresh Composer bot and the transcript generated works, but if I load an older .transcript (non-Composer) it doesn't render in the chat control. Ping @cwhitten for an older transcript that generated this behavior.

[tonyanziano]

This seems to be due to an error thrown inside of Web Chat:

I believe the offending call to be the useDateFormatter() hook inside of the RelativeTime middleware, which eventually calls globalize.dateFormatter(...).

@compulim, @corinagum any ideas here off the top of your head?

[tomlm]

SandwichOrder.zip

Here's a transcript that doesn't load.

[compulim]

Looking at it now.

[compulim]

Related to microsoft/BotFramework-WebChat#3039.

If the transcript showing any dates beyond yesterday, it will blow up. 🤯

[jelmuei]

@cwhitten
I've just changed my system time to a date before the timestamp of the transcript files and this results in the Bot Emulator to successfully load old Transcript files.

None of these official sample transcript files are working without this work around.
https://microsoft.github.io/botframework-solutions/skills/samples/transcripts/

Would be good if this bug could be fixed as we are using transcripts files to review beta testings of our bot.

[tonyanziano]

Hi @jelmuei ,

I'm glad to hear you found a workaround.

We are still waiting for this to be fixed in Web Chat (microsoft/BotFramework-WebChat#3039), and can't fix the issue in the Emulator until that is done.

[jelmuei]

@tonyanziano

Is there a update? Essentially the whole transcript functionality is broken now.

We have a big collection of transcript files of conversations from our beta testers but we do not have a way to use them for enhancing the conversational flow of our bot.

Is there another way to read transcripts files in some form of a GUI based tool and render them so our product people can review them?

[tonyanziano]

Hi @jelmuei ,

The Emulator & Web Chat teams are spread pretty thin at the moment due to some other pressing tasks in our pipeline, so unfortunately I can't give you an update on when this will be fixed.

As a workaround, you can download an older version of the Emulator (I tried v4.5.2 and it worked), and the transcripts will be displayed properly in the GUI. There was a performance issue around loading transcripts present in this version, so it may take a little while for the transcript to completely render if it is large, but just be patient.

Hope this helps.