Monthly Archives: August 2016

Persisting data within a conversation with botframework’s dialogs

In the previous botframework article I covered the different types of responses available for the botframework. This article is going to touch on the Dialog and persisting information between subsequent messages.

So what’s a Dialog?

Dialogs can call child dialogs or send messages to a user. Dialogs are suspended when waiting for a message from the user to the bot. Dialogs are resumed when the bot receives a message from the user.

To create a Dialog, you must implement the IDialog<T> interface and make your dialog class serializable, something like this:

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Rate-Limiting, Powershell, Pester, and the ZenDesk API

Have you ever had to utterly hammer an API via a little Powershell script, only to find you’re getting rate limited, and lose all that previously downloaded data before you could persist it somewhere?

I have. I’ve recently put together a script to query a customer support ticketing system’s API, get a list of all tickets within a given time period, then query again to get to get the full content for each ticket.

All of this data is being added to a custom Powershell object (as opposed to churning out to a file as I go) since I convert it all to Json right at the end.

I’d rather not get half way through a few thousand calls and then have the process fail due to being throttled, so I’ve chosen to create a little function that will check for – in my case – an HTTP 429 response (“Too Many Requests”), get the value of the “Retry-After” header, then wait that many seconds before trying again.

This particular implementation is all quite specific to the ZenDesk API, but could easily be adapted to other APIs which rate limit/throttle and return the appropriate headers.

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