Adaptive Cards send their Submit results a little different than regular user text. When a user types in the chat and sends a normal message, it ends up in context.activity.text
. When a user fills out an input on an Adaptive Card, it ends up in context.activity.value
, which is an object where the key names are the id
in your menuJson
and the values are the field values in the adaptive card.
For example, the json:
{
"type": "AdaptiveCard",
"body": [
{
"type": "TextBlock",
"text": "Test Adaptive Card"
},
{
"type": "ColumnSet",
"columns": [
{
"type": "Column",
"items": [
{
"type": "TextBlock",
"text": "Text:"
}
],
"width": 20
},
{
"type": "Column",
"items": [
{
"type": "Input.Text",
"id": "userText",
"placeholder": "Enter Some Text"
}
],
"width": 80
}
]
}
],
"actions": [
{
"type": "Action.Submit",
"title": "Submit"
}
],
"$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
"version": "1.0"
}
.. creates a card that looks like:

If a user enters "Testing Testing 123" in the text box and hits Submit, context.activity
will look something like:
{ type: 'message',
value: { userText: 'Testing Testing 123' },
from: { id: 'xxxxxxxx-05d4-478a-9daa-9b18c79bb66b', name: 'User' },
locale: '',
channelData: { postback: true },
channelId: 'emulator',
conversation: { id: 'xxxxxxxx-182b-11e9-be61-091ac0e3a4ac|livechat' },
id: 'xxxxxxxx-182b-11e9-ad8e-63b45e3ebfa7',
localTimestamp: 2019-01-14T18:39:21.000Z,
recipient: { id: '1', name: 'Bot', role: 'bot' },
timestamp: 2019-01-14T18:39:21.773Z,
serviceUrl: 'http://localhost:58453' }
The user submission can be seen in context.activity.value.userText
.
Note that adaptive card submissions are sent as a postBack, which means that the submission data doesn't appear in the chat window as part of the conversation--it stays on the Adaptive Card.
Using Adaptive Cards with Waterfall Dialogs
Your question doesn't quite relate to this, but since you may end up attempting this, I thought it might be important to include in my answer.
Natively, Adaptive Cards don't work like prompts. With a prompt, the prompt will display and wait for user input before continuing. But with Adaptive Cards (even if it contains an input box and a submit button), there is no code in an Adaptive Card that will cause a Waterfall Dialog to wait for user input before continuing the dialog.
So, if you're using an Adaptive Card that takes user input, you generally want to handle whatever the user submits outside of the context of a Waterfall Dialog.
That being said, if you want to use an Adaptive Card as part of a Waterfall Dialog, there is a workaround. Basically, you:
- Display the Adaptive Card
- Display a Text Prompt
- Convert the user's Adaptive Card input into the input of a Text Prompt
In your Waterfall Dialog file (steps 1 and 2):
async displayCard(step) {
// Display the Adaptive Card
await step.context.sendActivity({
text: 'Adaptive Card',
attachments: [yourAdaptiveCard],
});
// Display a Text Prompt
return await step.prompt('textPrompt', 'waiting for user input...');
}
async handleResponse(step) {
// Do something with step.result
// Adaptive Card submissions are objects, so you likely need to JSON.parse(step.result)
...
return await step.next();
In your bot.ts
file (step 3):
const activity = dc.context.activity;
if (!activity.text && activity.value) {
activity.text = JSON.stringify(activity.value);
}