HowToExtend.md

How to extend

How to add new templates

To add a new template a developer simply needs to:

1. Create and add the new template json file in <project>/plugins/templateSelector/templates directory

2. Add a reference to the template location and corresponding field that will be used to identify the template in the <project>/plugins/templateSelector/templateConfig.json

3. Make any necessary updates to code for the template selection logic in the plugins/templateSelector plugin (there may be none)

4. If applicable, make any necessary updates to code for the plugins/preProcessor and/or plugins/postProcessor logic

Designing Adaptive Cards and Templates

A great resource is the adaptive card designer which can be found here. This helps to prototype and adjust the various settings/styles and options for adaptive cards before creating the template code for them. The Schema Explorer and Samples pages are also excellent resources to help with designing new adaptive card templates.

Reducing drop-down options when too many are returned

To address the need to reduce the number of items returned and rendered in a drop down can be addressed by creating an additional adaptive card template in the flow that uses an Input.Text field type and allows the user to search on a keyword. Based on this input text field, you can add functionality to the bot to handle these search terms sent into the messaging extension MessagingExtensionQuery. In this way you can pre-filter and only provide relevant options for the user to choose between.