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Part 2: Manage dynamic data with Convoboss CMS
Let's learn how to use CMS (Content Management System), one of the key features of Convoboss to manage dynamic data of your chatbot. With CMS, your users can browse your products on chatbot easily. Maintaining and updating chatbot data without being impacted by the conversational flow of chatbot have never been easier with CMS Convoboss chatbot. In this video, we'll go through four parts:
What is CMS
How to set up CMS
How to use CMS in Flow Editor
How to connect entities using CMS reference
Part 1: What is CMS
The CMS (Content Management System) is one of the Convoboss special features that is used to create and manage dynamic content. CMS is made up of Entity and Item. Entity is the top-level container for all the content and is a set of items that have the same attributes.
Part 2: How to set up CMS
From the dashboard of a bot, go to Build > CMS to open the CMS management site. You can click here or the “New Entity” button to create a new entity. Let’s type in “Product” to create a data set of products for this restaurant chatbot. Remember that you can always insert data in other languages using the “Change Editing Language” button.
Here, click this small configuration button to set up the entity, then select Form Fields. To create a field, you need to fill in sufficient information including Field Name, Field Unique Name, and Type. There are 7 types of data field and the most special is Entities Reference will be introduced in the latter part of this video. To introduce clearly the products, let’s create two fields named: “Description” and “Photo” with data type is “Text” and “Photo” respectively. Don’t forget to click the “ + “ button to save. Remember, you can change or add more fields at any time.
Now that you’ve finished setting up an entity, let’s add meat to the bones by creating some items. Select the entity, then click the “New item” button. Here, just type the product name into the Name box. The Status field can be set as Enabled or Disabled. “Enabled” means that the item can be used in many places in the bot flow, and “Disabled” is the opposite. Continue to fill in the description. To add a photo for an item, you can upload a file directly from your computer or insert a file URL, like this. (If you want to update a field, just click on the item, make changes, and click Update to finish.)
Part 3: How to use CMS in Flow Editor
CMS data can be inserted into elements of block and quick replies.
Loading CMS data into blocks: On the canvas, click on the block you want to insert CMS data and open its Properties panel. Then, enable the Use CMS Data option and select the entity you want to extract data from. You can create conditions to filter items to be inserted into the block. These conditions are set based on the CMS fields. Next, set up the Max Number of Items in an Entity found each time. This option is only available in listing blocks. The last two options, Sort By and Order By allows you to set up how items will be displayed.
We’re done with the settings for a block, let’s start mapping elements with fields of chosen CMS entity. Here, click on the title of an item and replace it by the variable {entity.name} which represents the name of products. Similarly, replace the current default subtitle by {entity.description}. For multimedia elements like a photo, set the image sources as CMS and select the photo field you already created before.
Loading CMS data into Quick reply: Here, we use a simple text block for an example. On the Properties panel of this block, select CMS under Quick reply. Click on the quick reply element and setup it with Entity name, Max Number of Items, and other two options. Items can be displayed with two fields including text and image.
Part 4: How to connect Entities using CMS reference
Entities Reference is very useful when there are items in different entities that have relations. For example, a restaurant wants to show a list of products which are categorized under separate groups, how to do that? Go to CMS and create an Entity named “Category” which have at least one field “Name”. Create some items such as “Breakfast”, “Kid”, “Lunch”, etc. Go back to the “Product” entity and add one more field named “Category” with Entities Reference type which refers to “Category” entity. After that, classify each item with the “category” field.
In Flow Editor, click on this block, enable CMS Quick Reply, use entity “Category” created recently and replace the text by the name of items ( {entity.name} variable ). After that, save user response to variable name it for example, “category”. In settings of “Horizontal List 1”, create a condition to filter items based on the user’s response for “Simple Text 10”. The condition is: Category is variable {category}. You can test these two blocks to see the connection. When you select the menu for Breakfast, relevant dishes are filtered.
What is CMS
How to set up CMS
How to use CMS in Flow Editor
How to connect entities using CMS reference
Part 1: What is CMS
The CMS (Content Management System) is one of the Convoboss special features that is used to create and manage dynamic content. CMS is made up of Entity and Item. Entity is the top-level container for all the content and is a set of items that have the same attributes.
Part 2: How to set up CMS
From the dashboard of a bot, go to Build > CMS to open the CMS management site. You can click here or the “New Entity” button to create a new entity. Let’s type in “Product” to create a data set of products for this restaurant chatbot. Remember that you can always insert data in other languages using the “Change Editing Language” button.
Here, click this small configuration button to set up the entity, then select Form Fields. To create a field, you need to fill in sufficient information including Field Name, Field Unique Name, and Type. There are 7 types of data field and the most special is Entities Reference will be introduced in the latter part of this video. To introduce clearly the products, let’s create two fields named: “Description” and “Photo” with data type is “Text” and “Photo” respectively. Don’t forget to click the “ + “ button to save. Remember, you can change or add more fields at any time.
Now that you’ve finished setting up an entity, let’s add meat to the bones by creating some items. Select the entity, then click the “New item” button. Here, just type the product name into the Name box. The Status field can be set as Enabled or Disabled. “Enabled” means that the item can be used in many places in the bot flow, and “Disabled” is the opposite. Continue to fill in the description. To add a photo for an item, you can upload a file directly from your computer or insert a file URL, like this. (If you want to update a field, just click on the item, make changes, and click Update to finish.)
Part 3: How to use CMS in Flow Editor
CMS data can be inserted into elements of block and quick replies.
Loading CMS data into blocks: On the canvas, click on the block you want to insert CMS data and open its Properties panel. Then, enable the Use CMS Data option and select the entity you want to extract data from. You can create conditions to filter items to be inserted into the block. These conditions are set based on the CMS fields. Next, set up the Max Number of Items in an Entity found each time. This option is only available in listing blocks. The last two options, Sort By and Order By allows you to set up how items will be displayed.
We’re done with the settings for a block, let’s start mapping elements with fields of chosen CMS entity. Here, click on the title of an item and replace it by the variable {entity.name} which represents the name of products. Similarly, replace the current default subtitle by {entity.description}. For multimedia elements like a photo, set the image sources as CMS and select the photo field you already created before.
Loading CMS data into Quick reply: Here, we use a simple text block for an example. On the Properties panel of this block, select CMS under Quick reply. Click on the quick reply element and setup it with Entity name, Max Number of Items, and other two options. Items can be displayed with two fields including text and image.
Part 4: How to connect Entities using CMS reference
Entities Reference is very useful when there are items in different entities that have relations. For example, a restaurant wants to show a list of products which are categorized under separate groups, how to do that? Go to CMS and create an Entity named “Category” which have at least one field “Name”. Create some items such as “Breakfast”, “Kid”, “Lunch”, etc. Go back to the “Product” entity and add one more field named “Category” with Entities Reference type which refers to “Category” entity. After that, classify each item with the “category” field.
In Flow Editor, click on this block, enable CMS Quick Reply, use entity “Category” created recently and replace the text by the name of items ( {entity.name} variable ). After that, save user response to variable name it for example, “category”. In settings of “Horizontal List 1”, create a condition to filter items based on the user’s response for “Simple Text 10”. The condition is: Category is variable {category}. You can test these two blocks to see the connection. When you select the menu for Breakfast, relevant dishes are filtered.