Prompting users for field info in VA Chat

Products

• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager
• CA Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

The existing documentation describes how to have the VA Chatbot query the end user for custom attributes when it is creating a ticket.  This article provides supplemental information about this functionality.

Environment

Release:  `17.4 GA and above

CA Service Desk Manager

Resolution

To achieve this, you will need to modify the files intent_mapper.cfg and entity_mapper.cfg, located in C:\Program Files\CA\xFlow\APPS\Services\collabmicroservice-17.0.479\conf.

In the intent_mapper.cfg, add the attributes in entity and actions listings under create_ticket intent

In the entity_mapper.cfg, the attributes also need to be included.

Once the files are modified, you will need to recycle xFlow as well as re-train the VA Chatbot.

Additional Information

Following the above documentation example, there is a running example that can be used to add the existing Ticket Impact as an attribute which the end user will be prompted to provide, an example of "Single RELation (SREL) Attribute" being added.

The attached files to this KB are a version of the intent_mapper.cfg and entity_mapper.cfg files with the modifications already introduced to prompt the end user for Ticket impact.   We recommend downloading the files and comparing them against the original versions of these files.

You may also try using these files directly.  It is recommended though to try in a non-production SDM instance, as xFlow services needs to be restarted and VA Chatbot will need to be retrained.  The baseline versions of these files are from a 17.4 RU4 implementation.

If the changes are performed per the documentation or the attached cfg files, the chat interaction would look similar to this:

Note:  the input of "Medium" is demonstrated here intentionally to demonstrate that the expected Impact value should be an integer, more specifically the enum value of the Impact field.

Prior to any RU updates or major upgrades, please back up these files and review the same files post-install to compare for any changes to the baseline file.

This method cannot be used to prompt end users for property values that come from a given category selection when creating a ticket.  Properties from the category do not become available to the request ticket until after the ticket has been created.