Connecting Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF) with Oracle Intelligent Bots

[Oracle Intelligent Bot 18.1.1]

In this post, we will see how to create a client in Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF) to connect with chatbot developed in Oracle Intelligent Bot. In this example, I am using bot version 18.1.1 and sample server in the bot instance.

To achieve this, we need to 

• Create a webhook channel in Bot
• Create a channel in web socket server
• Create a client in MAF

Create a webhook channel in Bot

• Go to settings in bot service
• Select Channels tab
• Click on “+ Channel” button, a window will be opened to create a channel
• Fill name and description fields
• Select Channel Type as “webhook”
• Platform version as “1.1 (Conversation model)”
• Fill Outgoing webhook URI as below (Below is a sample url if you are using sample server and channel id you can copy from webhook url. If you are using other server, please fill this accordingly)
• https://bots-samples-nodejs:8889/ext/apps/chat/bots/<channel id>/messages
• Enable the channel and Click on create

Create a channel in web socket server

• Open admin console of the sample server : http://<host>:8888/ext/apps/chat/admin/
• Select Channels tab
• Click on “New Channel” button
• Fill name and description
• Copy server key and webhook URL from the bot created above and fill here
• Click on Save

Create the client in MAF

Please follow below steps to integrate MAF with the web chat client widget.

• Go to dev-resources of the bot instance and download the web client source code
• Create a MAF application
• Go to folder structure and navigate to public_html folder under ViewController folder of the app
• Copy web client source code folder inside the public_html folder
• Go to jdeveloper, open maf-feature.xml
• Click on + icon and create a new feature
• Under content, select type as “Local HTML”
• In the copied chatclient folder, there is an index.html page. Select this page for URL under the feature content
• Open settings.js file inside the chatclient folder
• Update the Uri and channel id with your bot details
• User id is hardcoded here to “Anand”, but you can pass username at runtime if required
• Now, run the app, a chat window will appear in the app