Tag: FormFlow

Building conversational forms with FormFlow and Microsoft Bot Framework – Part 2 – Customising your form

garypretty 1 Comment

In my last post I gave an introduction to FormFlow (Building conversational forms with FormFlow and Microsoft Bot Framework – Part 2), part of the Bot Framework which allows you to create conversational forms automatically based on a model and allows you to take information from a user with many of the complexities, such as validation, moving between fields and confirmation steps handled for you. At this point if you have not read the last post I encourage you to give it a quick read now as this post follows on directly from that.

As promised, in this post we will dig further into FormFlow and how you can customise the form process and show you how you can change prompt text, the order in which fields are requested from the user and concepts like conditional fields.

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Building conversational forms with FormFlow and Microsoft Bot Framework – Part 1

garypretty 4 Comments

Forms are common. Forms are everywhere. Forms on web sites and forms in apps. Forms can be complicated – even the simple ones. For example, when a user completes a contact form they might provide their name, address, contact details, such as email and telephone, and their actual contact message.  We have multiple ways that we might take that information, such as drop down lists or simply free text boxes. Then there is the small matter of handling validation as well, required fields, fields where the value needs to be from a pre-defined set of choices and even conditional fields where if they are required is determined by the user’s previous answers.

So, what about when we need to get this type of information from a user within the context of a bot? We could build the whole conversational flow ourselves using traditional bot framework dialogs, but handling a conversation like this can be really complex. e.g. what if the user wants to go back and change a value they previously entered?  The good news is that the bot framework has a fantastic way of handling this sort of guided conversation – FormFlow.  With FormFlow we can define our form fields and have the user complete them, whilst getting help along the way.

In this post I will walk through what is needed to get a basic form using FormFlow working.

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