chapter01

Chapter01

Run your first skill by using ask-sdk-controls

Let's run your first skill by using ask-sdk-controls.

At first, open src/index.ts. This is the whole skill code of Chapter01.

import { SkillBuilders } from 'ask-sdk-core';
import {
    ContainerControl,
    ContentAct,
    ControlHandler,
    ControlInput,
    ControlManager,
    ControlResponseBuilder,
    ControlResultBuilder,
} from 'ask-sdk-controls';

class HelloWorldAct extends ContentAct {
    render(input: ControlInput, responseBuilder: ControlResponseBuilder) {
        responseBuilder.addPromptFragment('Hello World');
    }
}

class RootControl extends ContainerControl {
    async canHandle(input: ControlInput) {
        return true;
    }

    async handle(input: ControlInput, resultBuilder: ControlResultBuilder) {
        resultBuilder.addAct(new HelloWorldAct(this));
    }
}

export class HelloWorldControlManager extends ControlManager {
    createControlTree() {
        return new RootControl({ id: 'RootControl' });
    }
}

export const handler = SkillBuilders.custom()
    .addRequestHandlers(new ControlHandler(new HelloWorldControlManager()))
    .lambda();

HelloWorldControlManager class is the ControlManager which creates control tree.

In this code, this class deals RootControl class which just responds just adding HelloWorldAct to all kinds of request as root control.

And then, you need to generate instance of ControlHandler class with HelloWorldManager and set it as request handler. Then, ControlHandler handles control tree and returns response when receive the request.

To understand detail of it, you need to learn about Control and Act at first.

Control

Control has similar concepts with Intent Handler in alexa-skills-kit-sdk-for-nodejs.

It's confirmed whether can respond or not by using canHandle function, and be called handle function for execution.

Actually, RootControl class which very brief control is similar with Intent Handler.

But Control is not Intent Handler. There are some different feature from Intent Handler. Because of these, Control can orchestrate some logics than Intent Handler and contain other Control as it's child.

But in Chapter01, you don't need to learn about it. you just need to know canHandle and handle.

In this code, RootControl always returns true in it's canHandle method, so it's handle method is always called for every request.

Act

Act is the class for describing presentation logic. It receives ControlInput and ControlResponseBuilder as it's arguments of render method. ControlResponseBuilder has methods to build response. ControlInput has some properties about context of request (ex: HandlerInput of alexa-skills-kit-sdk-for-nodejs). Act builds response by using these.

In chapter01, HelloWorldAct just adds Hello World as it's response speech. You can add reprompt, card, APL if you want in this method.

Let's deploy and run it.

To deploy to AWS Lamdba, please following instruction as below.

1. Run yarn to install modules

$ yarn

2. Transpile .ts to .js. code would be generated under dist directory.

$ yarn run build

3. Copy node_modules to dist directory

$ cp -r node_modules dist/node_modules

4. Generate zip file

$ cd dist/ && zip -r bundle.zip * && cd ../

5. Deploy to AWS Lambda by using SAM

$ sam deploy --guided

So then, you would deploy code to AWS Lambda. You can test it by setting this Lambda function to endpoint of the skill.

Test

Let's execute yarn run test command at first. You would see results of unit tests. You can see it in tests/index.test.ts.

You can test your by generating instance of SkillTester class with ControlHandler you want to test.

To test, call testTurn with your expection of input and output.