How do I restart a series of dialogs in bot framework?

Question

I've got a simple bot game I'm developing. It has a Root Dialog, which can take you to two others - A Start Dialog and a Join Dialog.

Join Dialog can lead to the Play Game Dialog, which when the game is over leads you to a Score Dialog. Feels like a lot bot (sic) but it runs smoothly. When scoring is done, I'd like to get back to the Root Dialog for another round.

But I'm stuck.

Even though I issue both an EndDialog() activity and a CodeAction() activity that simply calls DialogContext.CancelAllDialogs(), I remain within what looks like the EndDialog and therefore I don't get back to Root. Thus, I can't restart my game. Is there something I'm missing? I'm using both Adaptive Dialogs as well as Adaptive Cards and Hero Cards. Although, I don't think the cards should matter.

Can you please provide some code for troubleshooting, specifically your root dialog, what you are doing at the conclusion of your dialogs, and possibly how you are transitioning between Join/Play/Score dialogs? — billoverton, Jun 11 '20 at 20:17
Specifically, I set AutoEndDialog = false, to control dialog end based on the flow of my game. So, I may not have been cleaning up after myself properly. — Irwin, Jun 12 '20 at 01:39

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 12 '20 at 01:35

So, this is what I ended up doing to get what I want. It might not be the best way, but it works:

I created a CodeAction dialog that runs when the message I want to trigger a round restart to come in - there's a specific intent that is tied to that. The CodeAction calls this method:

private async Task<DialogTurnResult> CancelAndReturnToRoot(DialogContext dc, object options)
{
        var lastDialog = dc;
        var secondToLastDialog = lastDialog;
        var journeysUp = 1;
        while (lastDialog != null)
        {
            lastDialog = lastDialog.Parent;
            if (lastDialog != null)
                secondToLastDialog = lastDialog;
            journeysUp++;
        }

        return await secondToLastDialog.CancelAllDialogsAsync();
}

This seems to release the dialogs that I created and let me get back to the beginning dialog.

How do I restart a series of dialogs in bot framework?

1 Answers1