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Dialogflow Bridge

A middleware + helper objects for responding to Dialogflow webhooks.

Requirements + Installation

To take full advantage of this library, you'll need:

1. A PSR-11 (formerly Container Interop) compatible container to pull dependencies from.
2. A framework that either uses double-pass middlewares (e.g. Slim 3) or the proposed PSR-15 middleware (e.g. Zend Expressive 2.0+), using PSR-7 requests and responses, to use the middleware component.

To install, use Composer:

Getting Started

The easiest way to integrate this library is by adding it as a route middleware to a supported (micro)framework. For example, with Slim 3:

To see your new app in action, point Dialogflow's web hook configuration at /hook on wherever you're hosting your app, create an intent with (or without) a name parameter, set the action name on that intent to hello, check the box to use the Web Hook for fulfillment, then call your new intent.

Now, let's break down what just happened:

1. Dialogflow called our web hook, which Slim routed to the DoublePass middleware.
2. That middleware handed the request off to the Router, which marshaled Question and Answer classes.
3. the Router saw that the Question had an action of hello, which matched one of the handlers passed to it, so it called the handler, getting an Answer back.
4. The Router passed the Answer back to the middleware, which updated the HTTP Response with the proper JSON payload.

Yu can learn more about each of these components later in this document.

Adding a Fallback

This library comes with a built-in, albeit generic, handler for when the action on an incoming web hook request doesn't match anything in your route mapping. The function signature is the same as a normal action handler, and any callable (a class with __invoke(), a Closure, etc.) can be used here. Just pass the callable as an additional parameter when creating your Router. Tweaking the previous example:

As your application gets more copmlex, you'll want to start...

Managing Handler Dependencies

An array of anonymous functions is a quick way to start handling web hook requests, but you'll probably want to put your handlers in your main application DI container as your project grows. For this case, you'll want to use Router::build() instead of Router::buildFromClosureArray(). build() takes three parameters:

1. An object that implements the PSR-11 ContainerInterface (e.g. Slim 3's container)
2. An array of mappings between action names (as keys) and container keys (as values). This provides a whitelist so incoming requests aren't pulling random services out of the container, and allows you to map multiple action names to a single dependency if you like.
3. The optional fallback callable.

Taking the previous example, but assuming we've now moved our "hello" handler into the container as "helloHandler", we'd end up with:

As you switch to class-based action handlers, you can (but don't need to) implement HandlerInterface to ensure your handler method has the right signature.

More on Middlewares

The DoublePass class can be used as an actual middleware, rather than as a Slim route callable, as needed; its third parameter is unused and not typehinted to allow for this.

If you'd rather use a framework that relies on the proposed PSR-15 middleware spec, set up an instance of the PSR15 class. In that case you'll need both a Router instance (just like DoublePass) and a callable that, given something JSON-serializeable as its only parameter, returns a PSR-7 ResponseInterface with the parameter JSON-encoded, plus the proper Content-Type header. If you're using Zend Diactoros, building the middleware will look like:

Objects

This library provides a couple of immutable objects that make interacting with Dialogflow web hooks a bit easier.

Question

Question wraps Dialogflow's web hook request JSON, allowing cleaner access to parameters, contexts, and other aspects of the web hook request. Normally you'll be provided a Question by the router, but you can also build a Question independently:

See method docblocks in the Question class for more information.

Answer

An Answer can be passed directly into json_decode() to produce the response body needed for an Dialogflow web hook call. Normally this will get generated by calling getBaseAnswer() on a Question. Doing so informs the Answer of which contexts are currently set, so they can be dropped if needed. This is the way the router handles Questions and Answers, but you can also call new Answer() directly.

See method docblocks in the Answer class for more information.