Voice – Alex Dunn

Alexa.Tip – Build Unit Tested Skills in .NET

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, design patterns, and implementations that developers might not be aware of, and how they can be applied to voice application development, best practices, and more!

In this post, we explore some more best practices in developing Alexa Skills in C# whether you are using an ASP.NET Core API or an AWS Lambda. This post will expand our previous posts about building better abstractions for handling Alexa responses and demonstrate how we can now properly Unit test these handlers as well as any other separated bits of logic that the Handler implementations consume.

Check out all the raw source code for this post, and more here: https://github.com/SuavePirate/Alexa.Tips.Net

Prerequisite

If you haven’t read up on how to use the Handler Registration Pattern, take a look at my earlier post here: Alexa.Tip – Using Handler Registration Pattern in .NET

The short version is that we use this pattern of registering IHandler implementations to handle different types of requests that our skill receives, regardless of whether we are using AWS Lambdas or ASP.NET Core APIs.

Unit Testing Handlers

Since we now have nice atomized units (Handlers) built for each of our RequestTypes and Intents, they are SCREAMING to be unit tested. So, we can easily test them against different scenarios given our positive and negative cases.

Take for example, the SimpleLaunchHandler that is responsible only for LaunchRequest, and whose HandleAsync() implementation returns a static response. The two main cases we want to test against is the HandleAsync() returning properly for a proper LaunchRequest, and that the CanHandle() implementation returns false for non LaunchRequest skill requests.

In these samples, I’m using xUnit for my Unit tests, but the same concept is applicable with any other Unit testing framework (and really any other language).

In each case, we want to separate our 3 A’s of testing, “Arrange”, “Act”, and “Assert”. For these basic examples, the three steps are pretty clear.

Arrange the Testable SkillRequest object
Act on the subject’s method we are testing by sending it the SkillRequest
Assert our final response

Let’s first test the CanHandle() against the postive case, meaning we want to send it data we want to be successful:

public class SimpleLaunchHandlerTests
{
    private readonly SimpleLaunchHandler _subject;
    public SimpleLaunchHandlerTests()
    {
        _subject = new SimpleLaunchHandler();
    }


    [Fact]
    public void SimpleHandler_CanHandleLaunchRequest()
    {
        // arrange
        var request = new SkillRequest()
        {
            Version = "1.0",
            Request = new LaunchRequest
            {
                Type = "LaunchRequest"
            }
        };

        // act
        var canHandle = _subject.CanHandle(request);

        // assert
        Assert.True(canHandle);
    }

}

Now let’s perform the opposite by sending it a request of a different type:

 [Fact]
public void SimpleHandler_CanNotHandleIntentRequest()
{
    // arrange
    var request = new SkillRequest()
    {
        Version = "1.0",
        Request = new IntentRequest
        {
            Type = "IntentRequest"
        }
    };

    // act
    var canHandle = _subject.CanHandle(request);

    // assert
    Assert.False(canHandle);
}

Now, we can look at the positive example of passing the LaunchRequest into the HandleAsync method:

[Fact]
public async Task SimpleHandler_ReturnsResponse()
{
    // arrange
    var request = new SkillRequest()
    {
        Version = "1.0",
        Request = new LaunchRequest
        {
            Type = "LaunchRequest"
        }
    };

    // act
    var response = await _subject.HandleAsync(request);

    // assert
    Assert.NotNull((response.Response.OutputSpeech as PlainTextOutputSpeech)?.Text);
}

Now that we have our LaunchRequest tested, let’s take a look at a simple static IntentRequest set of tests:

DogFactHandlerTests.cs

public class DogFactHandlerTests : IClassFixture<DogFactHandler>
{
    private readonly DogFactHandler _subject = new DogFactHandler();


    [Fact]
    public async Task DogFactHandler_ReturnsResponse()
    {
        // arrange
        var request = new SkillRequest()
        {
            Version = "1.0",
            Request = new IntentRequest
            {
                Type = "IntentRequest",
                Intent = new Intent
                {
                    Name = "DogFactIntent"
                }
            }
        };

        // act
        var response = await _subject.HandleAsync(request);

        // assert
        Assert.NotNull((response.Response.OutputSpeech as PlainTextOutputSpeech)?.Text);
    }

    [Fact]
    public void DogFactHandler_CanHandleIntentRequest()
    {
        // arrange
        var request = new SkillRequest()
        {
            Version = "1.0",
            Request = new IntentRequest
            {
                Type = "IntentRequest",
                Intent = new Intent
                {
                    Name = "DogFactIntent"
                }
            }
        };
        // act
        var canHandle = _subject.CanHandle(request);

        // assert
        Assert.True(canHandle);
    }
    [Fact]
    public void DogFactHandler_CanNotHandleLaunchRequest()
    {
        // arrange
        var request = new SkillRequest()
        {
            Version = "1.0",
            Request = new LaunchRequest
            {
                Type = "LaunchRequest"
            }
        };


        // act
        var canHandle = _subject.CanHandle(request);

        // assert
        Assert.False(canHandle);
    }
    [Fact]
    public void DogFactHandler_CanNotHandleOtherIntents()
    {
        // arrange
        var request = new SkillRequest()
        {
            Version = "1.0",
            Request = new IntentRequest
            {
                Type = "IntentRequest",
                Intent = new Intent
                {
                    Name = "AMAZON.HelpIntent"
                }
            }
        };


        // act
        var canHandle = _subject.CanHandle(request);

        // assert
        Assert.False(canHandle);
    }
}

Okay, cool, but what about stuff that isn’t static? What if I’m getting my data from somewhere else and want to test those cases? Let’s bring Moq into the picture!

Let’s take this handler for example:

SampleFactHandler.cs

public class SampleFactHandler : GenericHandler, IHandler
{
    private readonly SampleMessageDbContext _context;
    public SampleFactHandler(SampleMessageDbContext context)
    {
        _context = context;
    }
    public override string IntentName => "SampleMessageIntent";

    public override Type RequestType => typeof(IntentRequest);

    public override async Task<SkillResponse> HandleAsync(SkillRequest request)
    {
        // just grab one as an example
        var message = await _context.SampleMessages.FirstOrDefaultAsync();
        return ResponseBuilder.Tell(message?.Content ?? "I don't have any messages for you.");
    }
}

So this Handler uses an Entity Framework Core DbContext with a table of SampleMessage objects to get the content. In this sample, we just grab the first one, but you could imagine some more complex data-logic to pull out the proper message.

To unit test this, we can pass in different “Mock” implementations of the SampleMessageDbContext. For this, I usually use Moq, but you can also pass in a full implementation that you’ve built yourself.

Here are some samples of testing this with different Moq’d contexts to test a few scenarios. Note: we still want to test against the CanHandle and HandleAsync as well, but now we have two different cases to test for such as if there are no messages in the db, and when there is one.

SampleFactHandlerTests.cs

public class SampleFactHandlerTests
{
    [Fact]
    public async Task SampleFactHandler_ReturnResponseWithData()
    {
        // arrange
        var context = new Mock<SampleMessageDbContext>();
        context.Setup(d => d.SampleMessages.FirstOrDefaultAsync(CancellationToken.None)).Returns(Task.FromResult(new SampleMessage
        {
            Id = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(),
            Content = "This is a mocked response message"
        }));
        var subject = new SampleFactHandler(context.Object);
        var request = new SkillRequest()
        {
            Version = "1.0",
            Request = new IntentRequest
            {
                Type = "IntentRequest",
                Intent = new Intent
                {
                    Name = "SampleMessageIntent"
                }
            }
        };

        // act
        var response = await subject.HandleAsync(request);

        // assert
        Assert.NotNull((response.Response.OutputSpeech as PlainTextOutputSpeech)?.Text);
    }
    [Fact]
    public async Task SampleFactHandler_ReturnFallbackResponseWithNoData()
    {
        // arrange
        var context = new Mock<SampleMessageDbContext>();
        context.Setup(d => d.SampleMessages.FirstOrDefaultAsync(CancellationToken.None)).Returns(Task.FromResult<SampleMessage>(null));
        var subject = new SampleFactHandler(context.Object);
        var request = new SkillRequest()
        {
            Version = "1.0",
            Request = new IntentRequest
            {
                Type = "IntentRequest",
                Intent = new Intent
                {
                    Name = "SampleMessageIntent"
                }
            }
        };

        // act
        var response = await subject.HandleAsync(request);

        // assert
        Assert.True((response.Response.OutputSpeech as PlainTextOutputSpeech)?.Text == "I don't have any messages for you.");
    }
}

We can also, and probably should also add some CanHandle and non-assinable Intent types to test, but for the sake of not making you read the same thing over and over again, these are the two that matters.

Unit Testing Controllers

Personally, I don’t typically unit test my Controllers, but that’s because I have some general rules in place to not change them one they are implemented. However, when working on a team, it may be easier and more sustainable to implement a few test on the controller to guarantee that changes made to it don’t affect the currently working implementation.

Some basic positive/negative test might look like this:

SimpleAlexaControllerTests.cs

public class SimpleAlexaControllerTests
{
    [Fact]
    public async Task AlexaController_ResponseWithHandler() 
    {
        // arrange
        var subject = new SimpleAlexaController(new List<IHandler>{ new DogFactHandler() });
        var request = new SkillRequest()
        {
            Version = "1.0",
            Request = new IntentRequest
            {
                Type = "IntentRequest",
                Intent = new Intent
                {
                    Name = "DogFactIntent"
                }
            }
        };
        // act
        var response = _subject.HandleRequest(request);

        // assert
        Assert.NotNull((response.Response.OutputSpeech as PlainTextOutputSpeech)?.Text);
    }

    [Fact]
    public async Task AlexaController_ResponseWithoutHandler() 
    {
        // arrange
        var subject = new SimpleAlexaController(new List<IHandler>{ new SimpleLaunchHandler() }); // no DogFactHandler
        var request = new SkillRequest()
        {
            Version = "1.0",
            Request = new IntentRequest
            {
                Type = "IntentRequest",
                Intent = new Intent
                {
                    Name = "DogFactIntent"
                }
            }
        };

        // act
        var response = _subject.HandleRequest(request);

        // assert
        Assert.Null(response);
    }
}

Unit Testing Lambda Functions

Just like testing the Controller, if you are using AWS Lambda rather than ASP.NET Core, you can create unit tests against your Function endpoint in order to get some coverage. That could look simple like something here:

FunctionHandlerTests.cs

public class FunctionHandlerTests
{

    [Fact]
    public async Task LambdaFunction_ResponseWithHandler() 
    {
        // arrange
        var subject = new SimpleAlexaHandler();
        subject.Handlers = new List<IHandler>{ new DogFactIntent() });
        var request = new SkillRequest()
        {
            Version = "1.0",
            Request = new IntentRequest
            {
                Type = "IntentRequest",
                Intent = new Intent
                {
                    Name = "DogFactIntent"
                }
            }
        };
        // act
        var response = _subject.HandleRequest(request, null);

        // assert
        Assert.NotNull((response.Response.OutputSpeech as PlainTextOutputSpeech)?.Text);
    }

    [Fact]
    public async Task LambdaFunction_ResponseWithoutHandler() 
    {
        // arrange
        var subject = new SimpleAlexaHandler();
        subject.Handlers = new List<IHandler>{ new SimpleLaunchHandler() }); // no DogFactIntent handler
        var request = new SkillRequest()
        {
            Version = "1.0",
            Request = new IntentRequest
            {
                Type = "IntentRequest",
                Intent = new Intent
                {
                    Name = "DogFactIntent"
                }
            }
        };

        // act
        var response = _subject.HandleRequest(request);

        // assert
        Assert.Null(response);
    }

}

That’s all the unit test types for now! Anything else that needs testing would be tested outside the Alexa specific logic. But hey! Now we can write some strong and code-covered tested skills which leads to better skills overall

What’s next?

Check out more Alexa Developer Tips here: https://alexdunn.org/tag/alexa/

If you like what you see, don’t forget to follow me on twitter @Suave_Pirate, check out my GitHub, and subscribe to my blog to learn more mobile and AI developer tips and tricks!

Interested in sponsoring developer content? Message @Suave_Pirate on twitter for details.

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/

Alexa.Tip – Using Dependency Injection with Handlers in .NET

In this post, we explore some more best practices in developing Alexa Skills in C# whether you are using an ASP.NET Core API or an AWS Lambda. This time, we talk about taking our Handler Registration Pattern to the next level by using dependencies in them such as EF DbContexts or really any other service you want to inject.

Check out all the raw source code for this post, and more here: https://github.com/SuavePirate/Alexa.Tips.Net

If you haven’t read up on how to use the Handler Registration Pattern, take a look at my earlier post here: Alexa.Tip – Using Handler Registration Pattern in .NET

Building Handlers with Dependencies

So we’ve seen samples of simple Handlers that use static responses simply using the ResponseBuilder from the Alexa.NET Library, but now let’s take it to the next logical step and start to get some data from a database. In this case, I am using Entity Framework, and therefore need to access my DbContext to get data.

To do this, we should inject the DbContext, in this case a SampleMessageDbContext into the constructor of the SampleFactHandler, then use it locally in the HandleAsync() method to get a single message.

SampleFactHandler.cs

public class SampleFactHandler : GenericHandler, IHandler
{
    private readonly SampleMessageDbContext _context;
    public SampleFactHandler(SampleMessageDbContext context)
    {
        _context = context;
    }
    public override string IntentName => "SampleMessageIntent";

    public override Type RequestType => typeof(IntentRequest);

    public override async Task<SkillResponse> HandleAsync(SkillRequest request)
    {
        // just grab one as an example
        var message = await _context.SampleMessages.FirstOrDefaultAsync();
        return ResponseBuilder.Tell(message?.Content ?? "I don't have any messages for you.");
    }
}

Although this simple example just grabs the first row from the db for the SampleMessages table, you could imagine some more complex data logic applied here to find the proper response we want for the given request. I also added some quick null handling just to clean it up for a real sample.

Registering Handlers with Dependencies

Now that we have our SampleFactHandler, we need to register it to our ICollection, but also construct it using the SampleMessageDbContext. There are a couple ways to do this. For simple situations, you just need to register the DbContext in your Startup, then grab it from the ServiceCollection when creating the List:

Startup.cs

public class Startup
{
    public Startup(IConfiguration configuration)
    {
        Configuration = configuration;
    }

    public IConfiguration Configuration { get; }

    // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to add services to the container.
    public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
    {
        // add other dependencies first
        services.AddDbContext<SampleMessageDbContext>(options =>
        {
            options.UseInMemoryDatabase("InMemoryDbForTesting");
        });

        // Register your handlers here!
        services.AddScoped<ICollection<IHandler>>(s =>
        {
            // get the db context to inject in the handlers that are dependent
            var dbContext = s.GetRequiredService<SampleMessageDbContext>();
            return new List<IHandler>
            {
                new SimpleLaunchHandler(),
                new DogFactHandler(),
                new SampleFactHandler(dbContext)
            };
        });

        services.AddMvc().SetCompatibilityVersion(CompatibilityVersion.Version_2_1);
    }

    // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to configure the HTTP request pipeline.
    public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env)
    {
        if (env.IsDevelopment())
        {
            app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage();
        }
        else
        {
            app.UseHsts();
        }

        app.UseHttpsRedirection();
        app.UseMvc();
    }
}

Alternatively, you could create a class whose responsibility is to hold onto the handlers and construct that list with all the IHandlers. Something like this:

IHandlerContainer.cs

public interface IHandlerContainer
{
    ICollection<IHandler> Handlers { get; }
}

HandlerContainer.cs

public class HandlerContainer : IHandlerContainer 
{
    public ICollection<IHandler> Handlers { get; private set; }
    public HandlerContainer(SimpleLaunchHandler launch, DogFactHandler dogFact, SampleFactHandler sampleFact)
    {
        Handlers = new List<IHandler> { launch, dogFact, sampleFact }
    }
}

With this container, we update our Startup to look something like this:

 public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
    {
        // add other dependencies first
        services.AddDbContext<SampleMessageDbContext>(options =>
        {
            options.UseInMemoryDatabase("InMemoryDbForTesting");
        });
        services.AddScoped<SimpleLaunchHandler>();
        services.AddScoped<DogFactHandler>();
        services.AddScoped<SampleFactHandler>();
        services.AddScoped<IHandlerContainer, HandlerContainer>();

        services.AddMvc().SetCompatibilityVersion(CompatibilityVersion.Version_2_1);
    }

Then our Controller would consume the IHandlerContainer rather than a flat ICollection to look like this:

SimpleAlexaController.cs

[Route("[controller]")]
public class SimpleAlexaController : Controller
{
    private readonly IHandlerContainer _handlerContainer;
    public SimpleAlexaController(IHandlerContainer handlerContainer)
    {
        _handlerContainer = handlerContainer;
    }
    [HttpPost]
    public async Task<SkillResponse> HandleRequest([FromBody]SkillRequest request)
    {
        var viableHandler = _handlerContainer.Handlers.FirstOrDefault(h => h.CanHandle(request));
        return await viableHandler.HandleAsync(request);
    }
}

I think this little pattern helps cleanup the Startup without needing to explicitly pull dependencies out of the ServiceCollection in order to build the IHandlers. Which do you prefer?

What’s next?

In future posts, we’ll take a look at building on these types of handlers with things like:

Well written Unit Tests
Full Integration Tests
Advanced Contextual driven handlers

If there’s enough interest in this pattern and the tools I’m building around it, let me know in GitHub or Twitter and I’ll work on getting them into properly libraries and NuGet packages 🙂

Check out more Alexa Developer Tips here: https://alexdunn.org/tag/alexa/

If you like what you see, don’t forget to follow me on twitter @Suave_Pirate, check out my GitHub, and subscribe to my blog to learn more mobile and AI developer tips and tricks!

Interested in sponsoring developer content? Message @Suave_Pirate on twitter for details.

Alexa.Tip – Using Handler Registration Pattern in .NET

In this post, we explore some more best practices in developing Alexa Skills in C# whether you are using an ASP.NET Core API or an AWS Lambda. This time, we talk about using the Registration Pattern for our Request Handlers. This post builds off of some of the concepts found in a previous post: Alexa.Tip – Build Intent Handlers in .NET but uses a newer abstraction tactic I like that can be found in my Alexa .NET Samples Repo here: https://github.com/SuavePirate/Alexa.Tips.Net

If you followed the previous post, you saw the benefits of abstracting our Alexa specific business logic into Handlers. That post talked specifically about IntentHandlers, but I’ve gone about implementing a new pattern for handling all request types that follows some of the same patterns of the official Alexa Skills Kit SDKs in JavaScript and Java but with all the C# goodness of Dependency Injection, Abstractions, async, and more.

Build Handlers

The primary concept is to create Handlers that register with information about what types of requests they can handle, then register those handlers for Dependency Injection (but in a slightly different way than normal), then finding the proper Handler for the given request and passing the rest of the transaction off to it to run its logic.

Here’s a look at our foundation: the IHandler:

IHandler.cs

public interface IHandler
{
    Type RequestType { get; }
    string IntentName { get; }
    bool CanHandle(SkillRequest request);
    Task<SkillResponse> HandleAsync(SkillRequest request);
}

So with this, we can use RequestType to validate what type of request the handler is for such as LaunchRequest or IntentRequest. You can take a peep at all the request types of Alexa Skills here: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/request-types-reference.html

We can also use the IntentName to easily assign a specific intent to a handler if the RequestType is IntentRequest. Then CanHandle() is used for applying custom validation logic to tell the registration what type of requests it is for. An implementation of this might validate the RequestType and IntentName while still allowing a specific Handler to apply its own logic to whether it can handle the request or not such as checking sessionAttributes or Context.

To handle this abstraction, I implemented an abstract class to implement the default CanHandle:

GenericHandler.cs

public abstract class GenericHandler : IHandler
{
    public abstract string IntentName { get; }
    public abstract Type RequestType { get; }
    public abstract Task<SkillResponse> HandleAsync(SkillRequest request);
    public virtual bool CanHandle(SkillRequest request)
    {
        if (request.GetRequestType() != RequestType)
            return false;
        if(request.GetRequestType() == typeof(IntentRequest))
        {
            if ((request?.Request as IntentRequest)?.Intent?.Name != IntentName)
                return false;
        }
        return true;
    }
}

If you are using C# 8 (I’m not in this case because its in preview at time of writing this), you can just use the Default Interface Implementation feature instead of using this extra abstract class at all. So your IHandler would look like this:

IHandler.cs

public interface IHandler
{
    Type RequestType { get; }
    string IntentName { get; }
    Task<SkillResponse> HandleAsync(SkillRequest request);
    bool CanHandle(SkillRequest request)
    {
        if (request.GetRequestType() != RequestType)
            return false;
        if(request.GetRequestType() == typeof(IntentRequest))
        {
            if ((request?.Request as IntentRequest)?.Intent?.Name != IntentName)
                return false;
        }
        return true;
    }
}

The last bit is the actual HandleAsync() which is just used to actually process the request and build a response to send back to Alexa.

So let’s look at a real implementation with the most simple example I can think of.

SimpleLaunchHandler.cs

public class SimpleLaunchHandler : GenericHandler, IHandler
{
    public override string IntentName => null;

    public override Type RequestType => typeof(LaunchRequest);

    public override Task<SkillResponse> HandleAsync(SkillRequest request)
    {
        return Task.FromResult(ResponseBuilder.Ask("Welcome to abstracted .NET Alexa Skills. How can I help?", null));
    }
}

Request type of LaunchRequest because we are handling the welcome message of the skill. We don’t override the CanHandle because we only care about the RequestType, and then the HandleAsync just returns a result task with a simple text-only response welcoming the user.

Here’s an example of a basic Intent Handler for a specific intent:

DogFactHandler.cs

public class DogFactHandler : GenericHandler, IHandler
{
    public override string IntentName => "DogFactIntent";

    public override Type RequestType => typeof(IntentRequest);

    public override Task<SkillResponse> HandleAsync(SkillRequest request)
    {
        return Task.FromResult(ResponseBuilder.Tell("Dogs do in fact have a sense of time, and even miss you when you're gone."));
    }
}

Just like the SimpleLaunchHandler, we set the RequestType but instead to IntentRequest, then supply the name of the Intent we want to handle.

Find and Execute Handlers

Now that we have some implementations of IHandlers, we can register them to use in our actual skill. The general idea is to create the collection of these handlers, then find the correct one to use given the type of request and execute it.

In it’s simplest form, we have a collection of handlers:

var handlers = new List<IHandler> { new SimpleLaunchHandler(), new DogFactHandler() };

Then find the right one to use:

var foundHandler = handlers.FirstOrDefault(h => h.CanHandle());

Then execute it:

var response = await foundHandler.HandleAsync(request);

Implement in ASP.NET Core

Let’s take a look at a real sample of how to do this using ASP.NET Core as if we were using HTTPS as our fulfillment URL of our skill rather than an AWS Lambda ARN.

First thing we should do is register our IHandlers for dependency injection in our Startup:

Startup.cs

public class Startup
{
    public Startup(IConfiguration configuration)
    {
        Configuration = configuration;
    }

    public IConfiguration Configuration { get; }

    // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to add services to the container.
    public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
    {
        // Register your handlers here!
        services.AddScoped<ICollection<IHandler>>(s =>
        {
            return new List<IHandler>
            {
                new SimpleLaunchHandler(),
                new DogFactHandler()
            };
        });

        services.AddMvc().SetCompatibilityVersion(CompatibilityVersion.Version_2_1);
    }

    // This method gets called by the runtime. Use this method to configure the HTTP request pipeline.
    public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env)
    {
        if (env.IsDevelopment())
            app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage();
        else
            app.UseHsts();

        app.UseHttpsRedirection();
        app.UseMvc();
    }
}

Now we can create a Controller that consumes an ICollection in the constructor. Alternatively, you can also register the IHandlers independently and then build the collection in the constructor of the Controller instead, but I kinda like this way better.

SimpleAlexaController.cs

[Route("[controller]")]
public class SimpleAlexaController : Controller
{
    private readonly ICollection<IHandler> _handlers;
    public SimpleAlexaController(ICollection<IHandler> handlers)
    {
        _handlers = handlers;
    }
    [HttpPost]
    public async Task<SkillResponse> HandleRequest([FromBody]SkillRequest request)
    {
        var viableHandler = _handlers.FirstOrDefault(h => h.CanHandle(request));
        return await viableHandler.HandleAsync(request);
    }
}

And that’s it! Now we can send requests to our /SimpleAlexa/ endpoint and use the handlers we registered. As we add more functionality to our Skill, we just create new IHandlers and add them to the Startup registration.

Implement in Lambda

So you might already know that Lambda functions don’t really play well with dependency injection outside of building a simple service locator, and their recommended practice is to build your code all in the lambda (yucky for us C# devs) or build your depdendent classes all at the beginning of executing the function. For this scenario, I like to have a single method for building my primary dependency (in this case, it’s the list of handlers again!). So our full Lambda Function code might looke like this:

Function.cs

public class Function 
{
    public async Task FunctionHandler(SkillRequest request, ILambdaContext context)
    {
        var viableHandler = BuildHandlers().FirstOrDefault(h => h.CanHandle(request));
        return await viableHandler.HandleAsync(request);
    }

    private ICollection<IHandler> BuildHandlers()
    {
        return new List<IHandler> { new SimpleLaunchHandler(), new DogFactHandler() };
    }
}

What’s next?

This is a pretty neat design pattern I’ve been working out in some custom Alexa Skills to help scale the codebase of more complex scenarios. These samples are quite simple, but hopefully convey how easy it is to get setup with this pattern, and start to get you thinking about ways to build ontop of this pattern.

In future posts, we’ll take a look at building on these types of handlers with things like:

Well written Unit Tests
Full Integration Tests
Using Entity Framework
Using multi-level dependency injection
Advanced Contextual driven handlers

If there’s enough interest in this pattern and the tools I’m building around it, let me know in GitHub or Twitter and I’ll work on getting them into properly libraries and NuGet packages 🙂

Check out more Alexa Developer Tips here: https://alexdunn.org/tag/alexa/

If you like what you see, don’t forget to follow me on twitter @Suave_Pirate, check out my GitHub, and subscribe to my blog to learn more mobile and AI developer tips and tricks!

Interested in sponsoring developer content? Message @Suave_Pirate on twitter for details.

Alexa.Tip – Build Intent Handlers in .NET

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 explore some more best practices in developing Alexa Skills in C# whether you are using an ASP.NET Core API or an AWS Lambda. This time, we talk about abstracting our business logic out of either our Function or Controller and into separate Handler classes.

If you’ve done skill development in node.js or in .NET, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of docs, example apps, and real world apps are written with one BIG class or file. That’s pretty gross.

You may some C# examples look like this:

UglyFunction.cs

public class Function
{
    public async Task<SkillResponse> HandleRequest(SkillRequest input)
    {
        if(input.GetRequestType() == typeof(LaunchRequest))
        {
            return ResponseBuilder.Ask("Welcome to my skill written in one big function class with all my business logic in one place and no real testability! Ask me anything!", null);
        }

        if(input.GetRequestType() == typeof(IntentRequest))
        {
            var intentRequest = input.Request as IntentRequest;

            switch(intentRequest.Intent.Name)
            {
                case "MyIntent1":
                    // get slot values
                    // search database
                    // validate data
                    // build response 
                    // add card if it supports a screen
                    // return
                    break;
                case "Intent2":
                    // get slot values
                    // search third party api
                    // validate data
                    // build response 
                    // add card if it supports a screen
                    // return
                    break;
                case "Intent3":
                    // get slot values
                    // search database
                    // validate data
                    // build response 
                    // add card if it supports a screen
                    // return
                    break;
                case "Intent4":
                    // get slot values
                    // search third party api
                    // validate data
                    // build response 
                    // add card if it supports a screen
                    // return
                    break;
                case "Intent5":
                    // get slot values
                    // search database
                    // validate data
                    // build response 
                    // add card if it supports a screen
                    // return
                    break;

                // I think you get my point here...
            }
        }

        return ResponseBuilder.Tell("Something went wrong. Please try again later");
    }
}

So that’s pretty gross right? It’s untestable, difficult to update, and hard to read! But hey, we’re C# developers. So let’s build Alexa Skills like C# developers.

The proposal here is to abstract your intent logic into Handler classes. Then you can inject those either into your Function or your Controller if you’re using a RESTful API.

Here’s something that I hope can get you started:
– A generic IIntentHandler
– An inherited specific IIntentWhateverHandler
– An implementation of the IIntentWhateverHandler
– A testable and injectable version to be used in the function.

Let’s start.

IIntentHandler.cs

public interface IIntentHandler
{
    Task<SkillResponse> HandleIntent(IntentRequest input);
}

Now let’s get specific. In this simple case, this interface is empty but exists for registration – although you can add specific methods here as needed.

IMyIntentHandler.cs

public interface IMyIntentHandler : IIntentHandler
{
}

Now let’s create an example implementation of an intent handler that houses the business logic of the request.

MyIntentHandler.cs

public class MyIntentHandler : IMyIntentHandler
{
    private readonly MyDbContext _context;
    public MyIntentHandler(MyDbContext context)
    {
        // oh snap, we can inject db context
        _context = context;
    }

    public async Task<SkillResponse> HandleIntent(IntentRequest input)
    {
        var mySlot = input.Slots["MySlot"].Value; // assumes the slot is there from it being required in the interaction model
        var myMessage = await _context.Messages.FirstOrDefaultAsync(m => m.SomeValue == mySlot)

        if(myMessage == null)
        {
            return ResponseBuilder.Ask("I don't know that one. Try something else.");
        }

        return ResponseBuilder.Tell(myMessage.Content);
    }
}

Now let’s go about adding these handlers to our Function (the same thing can apply to our Controllers.

PrettyFunction.cs

public class Function
{
    private readonly IMyIntentHandler _myIntentHandler;

    private void Setup()
    {
        _myIntentHandler = new MyIntentHandler(...);
        // create the others - optionally implement a ServiceCollection
        // to handle proper dependency injection
    }
    public async Task<SkillResponse> HandleRequest(SkillRequest input)
    {
        if(input.GetRequestType() == typeof(LaunchRequest))
        {
            return ResponseBuilder.Ask("Welcome to my skill written in one big function class with all my business logic in one place and no real testability! Ask me anything!", null);
        }

        if(input.GetRequestType() == typeof(IntentRequest))
        {
            var intentRequest = input.Request as IntentRequest;

            switch(intentRequest.Intent.Name)
            {
                case "MyIntent1":
                    return await _myIntentHandler.HandleIntent(intentRequest);
                    break;
            }
        }

        return ResponseBuilder.Tell("Something went wrong. Please try again later");
    }
}

So now you can separately test your Handler classes, your Data classes, and your Function as a whole.

SO much better 🙂

Conclusion

We don’t have to follow how Amazon writes their node.js skills when we write them in C# – let’s use some proper OO design and testability to build some scalable and awesome skills!

In the next post, we’ll talk about taking this one step closer to avoid that gross switch statement and simply register our Handler implementations for certain intents or RequestTypes which is more similar to how the actual ASK SDK works.

Stay tuned!

If you like what you see, don’t forget to follow me on twitter @Suave_Pirate, check out my GitHub, and subscribe to my blog to learn more mobile and AI developer tips and tricks!

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Prerequisite

Unit Testing Handlers

Unit Testing Controllers

Unit Testing Lambda Functions

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Building Handlers with Dependencies

Registering Handlers with Dependencies

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Build Handlers

Find and Execute Handlers

Implement in ASP.NET Core

Implement in Lambda

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Conclusion

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