[alicebot-general] Setting predicates to value of a variable

[Noel Bush]

In this case you may wish to ask on the pandorabots mailing list.  AIML 
does not provide any specification for how to assign predicate values 
from the "client side" through any means other than regular pattern 
matching (it does not really define anything like "client side" in any 
case, since the client/server distinction doesn't always hold).

Please note that the server-side <javascript/> element included in the 
AIML spec has no relation to client-side javascript that you may include 
in a template as you've shown below.

Also, when you do:

document.write("<set name="topic">Hi. What is your name</set>");

This just writes some markup to the HTML page which will be ignored and 
not displayed by the browser.  It doesn't somehow "feed back" to the 
AIML interpreter (unless Pandorabots provides some kind of 
postprocessing of the output HTML, which it might well, I don't know).

I suppose you could try to do something really weird like send, from 
javascript, a user input to the bot that would match a specially 
constructed category that could set a predicate value for you.  But it 
would be a pain (you'd need a special category for each predicate, since 
predicate names cannot be computed dynamically).

I would suggest either submitting a feature request for Pandorabots to 
provide some kind of "Ajax"-like capability like what I described below. 
  Or maybe somebody else (a developer of one of the many other AIML 
interpreters) has another idea.  What we're really looking at here is 
whether there should be / could be some kind of standardized AIML API, I 
guess.

Noel

Alan Haymes wrote:
> I should have said that I was using Pandorbots and my javascript is within an
> aiml category therefore presumably client side.  
> 
> My code is below (the line giving me the problem is in bold):
> 
> <category><pattern>HI</pattern>
> <template>
> <script language="JavaScript">
> function get_cookie ( cookie_name )
> {
> var results = document.cookie.match ( cookie_name + '=(.*?)(;|$)' );
> 
> if ( results )
> return ( unescape ( results[1] ) );
> else
> return null;
> }
> 
> if ( ! get_cookie ( "visitor" ) )
> {
> document.write("<set name="topic">Hi. What is your name</set>");
> }
> else
> {
> var visitor = get_cookie ( "visitor" );
> document.write ( "Hi " + visitor + ", welcome back to my website!" );
> }
> </script>
> <set name="name"><javascript>visitor</javascript></set>
> </template>
> </category>
> 
> 
> --
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