Is it possible, by BPMN rules, to use link events to communicate between different pools? Or the only possible way is through message flow?
The BPMN 2.0 specification elaborates on the usage of link events on pages 267 ff. (297 ff. in PDF).
While it does not explicitly state that link events must not be used to connect activities in different pools, some statements imply that doing so is at least not intended:
The spec stresses the role of link events as a substitute for sequence flows.
One of the examples is annotated as follows: "Note that the figure shows two different printed pages, not two Pools
in one diagram"
Furthermore, intermediate message events (see spec page 251/PDF: 281) are the obvious choice when modeling communication between pools without using message flows.
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I work in a large enterprise where multiple teams are developing Lex bots (on separate accounts). Each bot supports a different domain or application,. In some cases, it would be nice for a single user interface to ask a question without needing to know which bot to ask. Is there a way to federate bots, or to forward un-recognized intentions to 'backup' bots?
I feel like what I really want to do is treat each bot as a skill is treated in Alexa, except I'm in the position (through entitlements) to know which 'skills' would be appropriate for a given user.
The answer here is that you would need to develop a custom application that delivers a user's input to each of your company's array of bots.
You'd need to look at the NLU Confidence score from each Bot's response to decide which response is the most accurate to return to the user. Would also be worthwhile keeping some state in your app to remember which Bot the user is currently interacting with and defaulting to that Bot for successive user inputs. Should you reach a point where the confidence score is low, it might present a signal to you to test the user's input across the other Bots.
What you'll need to be aware of here is that your costs will increase with each additional Bot that you add. So, assuming you have 5 area-specific Bots, one inbound message from your user could result in 5 Lex calls. As you start moving into significant volumes of interactions, this could start proving to be an obstacle.
An alternative would be to use a custom fallback intent to invoke a Lambda function that calls your Bot orchestration function. Assuming that you're able to find the correct Bot to handle the user's query, you'd need to remember that so succesive messages now get routed to that Bot.
I want to build a smart search agent which would use Watson conversation to process the request and give response but will use my own database say SQL server to search the desired output.
In Short Instead of writing intents and dialogues manually or importing from a csv file, I want to write my won code in .net in such a way that all the request and responses are influenced by my own data stored in my database. I only intent to use watson's processing and interpreting capability. But the processing must happen on my data.
E.g If the user searches for a word say "Dog", the Watson conversation service must search in my database and give relevant answers to the user based on the search.
Take a look at the solution architecture in the Watson Conversation documentation. Your database would be one of the depicted backend systems. Your application would be, as you mentioned, written in .NET and would use WCS to process the user input. It would return a response with all the associated metadata. Instead of having complete answers configured in a dialog, you would use something I have described as "replaced markers" in my collection of examples. Those markers are kind of hints to your application of which database query or which action to perform.
Note that WCS requires some intents and entities to work on. If you want to rely just on the detected intents and entities, you could work with one or two generic dialog nodes. As another technique you could use data from your database to generate intents and entities as an initial setup. In my "Mutating EgoBot" I use the Watson Conversation API to add intents and entities on the fly.
I believe you should use the standard trick:
instead of defining resposnses in the node of your diaglog, define an action on the output object of the node and let your applicatation take care of providing response (see https://console.bluemix.net/docs/services/conversation/develop-app.html#building-a-client-application)
I'm working on a D2L add-on right now and trying to retrieve all the courses the current user is enrolled in. The only way I found so far is using the
GET /d2l/api/lp/(version)/enrollments/myenrollments/ call. This works perfectly for a small amount of courses and is extremely slow for more than approximately 50 courses. Is there any better way to retrieve all the enrollments?
Thanks in advance
For end-users, this call is indeed the one intended to address this need. Since a portion of the performance drop may come from having to process a series of data pages (requiring several calls), you can try several techniques to add a bit of performance here:
You can pre-filter the call based on org unit type: this likely requires you as the app developer to know the org unit type IDs for the org units of interest to your end users. For example, if your main use case here is "student wants to see all the course offerings she's enrolled in", then you can provide the appropriate org unit type ID for course offering org units to your API call. This becomes more difficult if your app must address several different back-end services, or you don't know the org unit type ID used by the back-end service for the relevant org unit types.
You can try using an HTTP library that can pool connections, and batch together the calls that fetch all the data pages you need to get the complete list of enrollments needed. This will provide you with some benefit to overhead on each call, but the performance benefit will likely only be marginal.
Currently, this API route does not allow the caller to request a particular data page size, and allowing that would improve the overall latency involved in this use case: for example, requesting a page size of 500 records could conceivably fetch back all the enrollments in a single call. I would judge page-size requesting to be a completely reasonable feature enhancement to request, and I would encourage you to request it on D2L's Product Idea Exchange; in fact, I'd be rather surprised if someone hasn't already done so.
Say you have a Recipe Manager application that you're building with a Web Api project. Do you send the list of recipes along with their ingredient names in JSON? Or do you send the recipes, ingredient names, and ingredient details? What's the process in determining how big the initial payload should be for a SPA?
These are the determining factors in how much to send to the client in an initial page:
Data that will be displayed for that first page
Lookup list data for any drop downs on that page
Data that is required for and presentation rules (might not be displayed but is used)
On a recipe page that would show a list of recipes, I would get the recipes and some key factors to display (like recipe name, the dish, and other key info) that can be displayed in a list. Enough for the user to make a determination on what to pick. Then when the user dives into a recipe, then go get that 1 recipe's details.
The general rule is get what you user will almost certainly need up front. Then get other data as they request it.
The process by which you determine how much data to send solely depends on the experience you want to provide your users - however it's as simple as this. If my experience demands that I readily display all of the recipes with a brief description and then allow them to drill into the recipe to get more information, then I'm only going to send enough information to produce the display and navigate further into the entity.
If then after navigating into the recipe it requires that you display the ingredient names and measures then send down that and enough information to navigate further into any single ingredient.
And as you can see it just goes on and on.
It depends if your application is just a simple HTTP API backing your web page, or your goal is something more akin to Platform As A Service. One driver for the adoption of SPA is that it makes the browser another client, just like an iOS or Android app,or a 3rd party.
If you want to support multiple clients, then it's likely that you want to design your APIs around the resources that you are trying to expose, such that you can use the uniform interface of GET/POST/PUT etc. against that resource. This will means it is much more likely that you are not coding in an client specific style and your API will be usable by a wide range of clients.
A resource is anything you would want to have its own URN.
I would suggest that is likely that in this case you would want a Recipe Book resource which has links to individual Recipe resources, which probably contain all the information necessary for that Recipe. Ingredients would only be a separate resource if you had more depth on what an Ingredient contained and they had their own resource.
At Huddle we use a Documentation Driven Design approach. That is we write the documentation for our API up front so that we can understand how usable our API would be. You can measure API quality in WTFs. http://code.google.com/p/huddle-apis/
Now this logical division might not be optimal in terms of performance. Your dealing with a classic tradeoff (ultimately architecture is all about balancing design tradeoffs) here between usability of your API and the performance of your API. Usually, don't favour performance until you know that it is an issue, because you will pay a penalty in usability or maintainability for early optimization.
Another possibility is to implement the OData query support for WebAPI. http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/odata-support-in-aspnet-web-api
That way, your clients can perform their own queries to return only the data they need.
I'm using trying to interface with Quickbooks Online for an internal application that will push and pull transactions using qbXML. My problem is that I can't figure out which message I need to send in order to list and add the items listed under the "Banking" > "Registers" page. I've gone through the messages listed in the Onscreen Reference for Intuit Software Development Kits and none of them seem to give me this information.
Also, does anyone know of a list that explains what each message does?
If you're in a bank account register, you're writing checks. There are 3 kinds of checks in QuickBooks:
Expense checks - if you added a check directly in the register window, you would be adding an expense check.
Bill payment checks - these appear in a check register, but you can only add them with a bill payment operation.
Payroll checks - these appear in the check register, but they can only be added using the Intuit Payroll Service or by enabling manual payroll (almost no one does manual payroll in actual practice, but it is good to know about for testing purposes).
The first 2 types of checks have their own message type: the Add/Mod Check and Add/Mod BillPayment messages respectively. Payroll checks can't be added by the SDK. You can query all 3 types using a Transaction query message. I should also mention that it's possible to add an entry in any register using a journal entry, but that's not a good idea unless you are certain you know what you're doing.
I hate to tell you this, but the best reference for QuickBooks messages is the one you're already using. There are also XML files in the <sdk root>\docs directory that describe SDK operations. But there is really no substitute for understanding how QuickBooks operates from a user's perspective.
If you're going to be working with QuickBooks integration, it's a good idea to make friends with one or more QuickBooks Pro Advisors so you can run these kinds of issue by them. The relationship is generally mutually beneficial, since QuickBooks Pro Advisors often find it handy to have access to an SDK programmer.