This web chat UI is an example implementation of a chat GUI that can be embedded in websites. It is built using the Vue.js javascript framework and based on Vue Beautiful Chat by Matteo Merola.

• Your bot needs to be published and you need to know the engine URL.
• When extending the UI, a basic understanding of Vue.js is required.

The quickest way to interact with your bot using this web chat UI is to deploy it to Heroku. If you want to modify the UI or add additional extensions, you can run the code locally as well.

Click the button below to create a new Heroku app that hosts the web chat:

1. Give the app a name (lowercase, no spaces)
2. In the 'Config Vars' section, add the following:
   • TENEO_ENGINE_URL: The engine url.
3. Click 'Deploy app'.

When Heroku has finished deploying, click 'View app'. You should now be able to use the web chat ui to talk to your bot.

If you want to run the code locally, proceed as follows:

1. Clone the project:

   git clone https://github.com/artificialsolutions/teneo-web-chat && cd teneo-web-chat
   

2. Install dependencies:

   npm install
   

   Note: if you're using Windows and get an error "'NODE_ENV' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.", you may want to install a module called win-node-env and run npm install again.
3. Create a .env file in the teneo-web-chat folder specifying the URL of your engine

   TENEO_ENGINE_URL=https://some.engine/instance/
   

4. Start the application:

   npm run start:dev
   

The page should be loaded on http://localhost:9000 now.

To add the web chat UI to your site, proceed as follows:

To build the bundle, run:

npm run-script build

This will add a file main.js in the /dist folder of the project. Add main.js to your site.

Make the following changes to each page where you want the web chat window to appear.

1. Add a link to main.js:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/webchat/main.js"></script>

2. Add an empty <div> (or something with an id that can be referenced in the initialization script), for example:

<div id="teneo-web-chat"></div>

3. Add the following initialization script before the closing </body> tag:

<script>
  window.onload = function () {
      if (
          window.TeneoWebChat &&
          typeof window.TeneoWebChat.initialize === 'function'
      ) {
          var element = document.getElementById('teneo-web-chat');

          window.TeneoWebChat.initialize(
              element,
              'Teneo Web Chat',
              'https://some.teneo/engine-instance/'
          );
      }
  }
</script>

When adding the script to your site, note the following:

• You can change the title that is displayed in header of the web chat window. In the script above it is specified as 'Teneo Web Chat'.
• The url https://some.teneo/engine-instance/ should be updated to match the url of your engine.
• Make sure the line var element = document.getElementById('teneo-web-chat'); references the id of the div specified in step 3.

The web chat UI can be extended by adding additional .vue files in the /src/components/messages/ folder. This file should parse the JSON that is included in an output parameter called teneowebclient in the engine response. The .vue file should display the data accordingly.

There are two example extensions included in the project.

This example extention displays an image below the bot's answer text.

The JSON that should be included in the teneowebclient output parameter should look as follows:

{
    "type": "image",
    "image_url": "https://url.to/an/image.png"
}

Allowed characters for the type name are a-z and - where - cannot be the first character. Based on the type, the Teneo Web Chat code will look for a matching Vue component in the /src/components/messages/ folder. The assumed file name is derived by taking the type field, turn it into upper CamelCase and append Message to the resulting string. E.g image becomes ImageMessage and image-list would become ImageListMessage.

Because the type is image, the web chat code looks for a component in a file called ImageMessage.vue and renders it. This is what the ImageMessage.vue file looks like:

<template>
  <div class="image-message">
    <img :src="imageUrl" />
  </div>
</template>

<script>
export default {
  name: 'ImageMessage',
  props: {
    message: {
      type: Object,
      required: true,
      validator: (message) => {
        return (
          message &&
          message.type === 'image' &&
          message.data &&
          message.data.image_url
        );
      },
    },
  },
  computed: {
    imageUrl() {
      return this.message.data.image_url;
    },
  },
};
</script>

<style scoped>
.image-message img {
  margin: 12px;
  max-width: 80%;
}
</style>

As you can see the file contains three sections:

• template: contains the html used to display the image
• script: contains the javascript to parse the engine json and return the image url
• style: contains the css styles to format the image

A second example extension shows how buttons can be displayed below the bot answer. When clicked a new input with the clicked postback value is sent to the bot.

To display three buttons (Small, Medium and Large), the JSON that needs to be included in the teneowebclient output parameter should look as follows:

{
    "type": "quickreply",
    "quick_replies": [
        {
            "title": "Small",
            "postback": "small"
        },
        {
            "title": "Medium",
            "postback": "medium"
        },
        {
            "title": "Large",
            "postback": "large"
        }
    ]
}

For each button, the title is displayed in the button and the postback value is sent back to engine when the button is clicked.

Because the type is quickreply, the web chat code looks for a component defined in a file called QuickreplyMessage.vue and renders it.

Again, everything needed to handle this type of extension is contained in the single .vue file. It contains a template section to specify the html, a script section to parse the json but to also handle what happens when a user clicks one of the buttons. It also contains the styles needed to style the buttons.

The Teneo API is available as this.$teneoApi if you need to send messages back to the bot. Look at the QuickreplyMessage.vue for an example of how to use it.

To add custom extensions, these are the steps to take:

1. Define the JSON that specifies the message type and any additional data.
2. Create an example flow in Teneo Studio that includes the JSON in the output parameter teneowebclient and publish your solution.
3. Create a .vue file for the message type
4. In the view file create the template, scripts and applicable styles
5. Test the result by connecting your web chat UI to the the engine with the example flow.

A repostory with additional example extensions can be found here: https://github.com/artificialsolutions/teneo-web-chat-extensions.

In many cases, the website that is hosting the web chat UI uses a different domain than the domain used by the Teneo Engine. Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is a mechanism that uses additional HTTP headers to tell a browser to let a web application running at one origin (domain) have permission to access selected resources from a server at a different origin.

By default the Teneo Engine includes CORS headers in the responses to browser requests coming from any domain. This means any site can add the web chat ui and interact with a Teneo Engine. If you want to restrict your solution to only include CORS headers for specific domains, you can add a file called tieapi_cors_origins.txt to the Teneo Resource Manager in the views folder. The file should contain the list of allowed origin domains (one domain per line, domains should include port numbers if applicable).