Graffiti for Dialogflow CX decouples Webhook Response messages from the fulfillment server. By decoupling the server's running code from response message templates we can empower the line of business to quickly update response messages from a browser instead of depending on tickets with internal IT or external partners who'd need (at least) a couple days just to process the request.
The Graffiti server is stateless: it'll happily live in a persistent compute engine instance or you could run it as an auto-scaling serverless service like Cloud Run or Google Kubernetes Engine.
To achieve statelessness, the response message templates live in Cloud Firestore, a NoSQL document database. Why Firestore you ask? Because: (a) it really is easy to use and (b) it has built-in realtime updates, which Graffiti listens for. Under the hood, the Graffiti server generates a cache of templates from Firestore and then listens for updates and changes in realtime. This concurrent-safe cache lets us respond to request without introducing round-trip latency (the templates are sitting in memory instead of making calls to Firestore for each request) while also managing template changes when Graffiti is up and running.
Pretty cool, right?
Graffiti Designer is a command line tool used by the fulfillment server developer to stage template definitions for users to interact with. Template definitions are defined in yaml. They look something like this:
agent-collection: dialogflow-agents
agent-name: graffiti-cx-demo-1
templates:
/start:
handler-name: StartHandler
calculated-variables:
- Date
prototype: "Hello there, it's {{.Date}}. How are you doing?"
/state:
handler-name: StateHandler
session-variables:
state: State
prototype: "{{.State}} ... interesting. Thanks for sharing. How old are you?"Every field inside the template definition serves a purpose. For instance, the handler-name field is used to look up the handlers source code in github and display it to the user so they can have an idea of what's happening every time the endpoint is called.
Once the definitions are staged, the Graffiti GUI (a web based application) can be used to make updates to the template's prototype - the string "template" that the fulfillment server will reply to a request with. Users can move session variables and calculated variables around, they can "bring" session variables if the developer adds a new variable, or they can remove variables from the template if they're not needed. Users can also interact with server-side calculated variables by moving it's placement within the endpoints prototype.
String prototypes should conform to Go's string templating format which can support more advanced logic. [MORE ON THIS LATER]
Fore more details on the Graffiti Designer, please see the Graffiti Designer Github page available here: GRAFFITI DESIGNER.