Tag: Skills

In this Alexa.Tip series, we explore some little bits of code that can make your life easier in developing Alexa Skills in many languages including C# + .NET, node.jS + TypeScript, Kotlin, etc. We look at concepts that developers might not be aware of, design patterns that and how they can be applied to voice application development, best practices, and more!

In this post, we’ll look at a simple tip to help secure your Alexa Skills when using an AWS Lambda. In a future post, we’ll look at a similar concept in .NET for developers using ASP.NET Core Web API instead of Lambdas.

So, you’ve taken the step to building proper data-driven Alexa Skills and have stepped out of the simple “todo” examples. Perhaps you need a database connection in your source code, need to change values depending on what environment you are running the skill in, or want to run your skill with options you can change without having to redeploy the codebase over and over again.

For all of these problems, your best bet is to use the Lambda Environment variables. Doing it is INCREDIBLY simple, yet I still see many developers unaware of how to use them and instead use runtime checks or don’t bother scaling their application at all to needing them.

In this example, we’ll look at how to create an instance of an Entity Framework DbContext and set it up for a testable injection based project.

Let’s look at a code snipet example of a piece of an Alexa Skill running in a .NET Lambda using a hard coded connection string:

Message.cs

// a simple table to represent some messages we can grab
public class Message
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Content { get; set; }
}

And here’s our DbContext we are going to grab data from:
MessageDbContext.cs

public class MessageDbContext : DbContext 
{
    public DbSet<Message> Messages { get; set; }

    public MessageDbContext(DbContextOptions options) : base(options) { }
}

Now check out a lambda I typically see with hard coded connection strings and settings:

BadLambda.cs

public class BadLambda
{
    // an EF DbContext with some message tables
    private readonly MessageDbContext _context;

    public BadLambda()
    {
        var optionsBuilder = new DbOptionsBuilder<MessageDbContext>()
            .UseSqlServer("my_connection_string", providerOptions => providerOptions.CommandTimeout(60));
        _context = new MessageDbContext(optionsBuilder.options);
    }

    public async Task<SkillResponse>(SkillRequest input)
    {
        var message = await _context.Messages.FirstOrDefaultAsync();
        return ResponseBuilder.Tell(message.Content);
    }
}

So breaking down the code… We have an EF DbContext with one table called “Messages” which has a column of Id and Content, and our Skill Lambda sets up the DbContext with a hard coded connection string and timeout setting, then returns the first messages as a simple response.

Let’s take this lambda and add environment variables so we can run mutliple environments for multiple dbs including a localhost db if we wanted to test locally before deploying to Lambda and so we can test updates before we make changes to our production skill!

In AWS

Head over to your lambda in AWS and scroll down to “Environment Variables”:

Here you can add any key-value pairs you want. For this demo, we want to put our database connection string and our timeout setting here:

Now make sure you smash that save button and head back to Visual Studio to make our final updates!

Don’t forget you can now also create another lambda for a development or staging environment separate from your production lambda – be sure to use a different database connection in your environment variables, and then you can publish to both 😀

In the Code

Now we just have to use the

Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable(string key);

method to grab the values of these environment variables we set up and we’re off to the races!

Here’s what that looks like when updates:

GoodLambda.cs

public class GoodLambda
{
    // an EF DbContext with some message tables
    private readonly MessageDbContext _context;

    public GoodLambda()
    {
        var connectionString = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("DatabaseConnectionString");
        var timeoutSetting = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("DatabaseCommandTimeout");
        var optionsBuilder = new DbOptionsBuilder<MessageDbContext>()
            .UseSqlServer(connectionString, providerOptions => providerOptions.CommandTimeout(int.Parse(timeoutSetting)));
        _context = new MessageDbContext(optionsBuilder.options);
    }

    public async Task<SkillResponse>(SkillRequest input)
    {
        var message = await _context.Messages.FirstOrDefaultAsync();
        return ResponseBuilder.Tell(message.Content);
    }
}

Now publish it to your lambda and you’re done!

Recap

• For the love of god, stop hard coding connection strings and settings in your lambda
• Use environment variables
• Setup multiple environments for scalability and testability
• Abuse Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable()
• Build more Alexa Skill 🙂

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I’m the Director and Principal Architect over at Voicify. Learn how you can use the Voice Experience Platform to bring your brand into the world of voice on Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana, chat bots, and more: https://voicify.com/

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