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Persisting the chat transcripts

To persist the conversation content, we selected a document oriented database running on IBM Cloud, public offering. The Web application can persist the conversation interactions in a single document. The control is done with the parameter conversation.usePersistence in the config.json under the server/config folder.

Pre-requisite

You need to have an active account on IBM Cloud, an organization and a space created.

Create a Cloudant Service in IBM Cloud

Use the Create resource button on top of the main IBM Cloud dashboard page, select Data & Analytics under the Platform category and then the Cloudant NoSQL DB service:

Be sure to select the region, organization and space you want to service to be added to.

Once created go to the service main page and Launch the client tool to create new database.

This web application helps administrators to access database instances.

Create a Database: wcsdb

From the top menu select Create Database and enter wcsdb as a name:

The main database dashboard is now displayed. We do not need to create any document yet, as the code will do it.

Get service credentials

So to make to code accessing the database we need to get the service credentials. At the Cloudant service main page select Service Credentials and add a new credential.

Open the config.json file to add the URL of the service and enable persistence in the conversation settings.

ATTENTION: when deploying into IBM Cloud private the configuration is defined in the deployment configuration. So you may want to tune both.

"watsonassistant": {
  "usePersistence": false
},
"dbCredentials" : {
  "url": "https://...-bluemix:cd....@...e50-bluemix.cloudant.com"
},

Implement service client

The code is in the server/routes/features/persist.js. The method is using Cloudant API module, and the conversation response. The code is using the persistId and revId of cloudant response to modify the Watson Assistant context with those two variables so a unique document is created for all interaction, and the document is updated at each interaction.

saveConversation : function(config,conv,next){
  var cloudant = require('cloudant')(config.dbCredentials.url);
  var db = cloudant.use('wcsdb');
  if (conv.context !== undefined) {
    if (conv.context.revId !== undefined) {
      conv._id=conv.context.persistId;
      conv._rev=conv.context.revId;
    }
  }
  db.insert(conv, function(err, data) {
    if (err) {
      next({error: err.message});
    } else {
      next(data);
    }
  });
}, // saveConversation

Browse conversation content in Cloudant console

After few conversation sessions, you can access some of the created documents using the Cloudant console:

Each document has a unique ID and revision id. All the content of the conversation is persisted.

It is helpful for assessing the conversation that did not terminate well, or with gaps in the scope of the dialog.

Access all conversations from a given timestamp

The persist.js add a timestamp variable in the persisted document so queries can be done on the document creation date. Cloudant exposes a query editor to search for documents in the database. The query is a JSON document.