Planner
The Planner enables working with calendars, like scheduling a meeting or planning a callback appointment. The skill implements the Calendaring features of the DialoX platform. Developers could have a look here for more details.
Planning outcomes
The Planner skills can deliver the following type of outcomes
| Planner outcome | Description |
|---|---|
Event | An event is like any regular calendar event you would find in your Google or Microsoft calendars having a date, start time and duration. |
Todo | A todo is modelled as a Note in the DialoX platform, but then having a due date. |
Determine availability
For the skill is able to support two different ways for determining which moments to allow to be scheduled. The availability of a certain moment in time can be determined according the following two strategies:
| Availability is based on… | Description |
|---|---|
Calendar free/busy | Scheduling is based on free space in the calendar since there can only be one event on any given moment in time. Once planned, this moment in time is no longer available for planning. |
Slot capacity | Scheduling is based on the predefined capacity for a certain moment in time, called a slot. This slot capacity depletes once all slots are planned causing this slot to be no longer available. |
Node variants
The above described outcome types and availability strategies determine the four different node variants that are introduced by this skill:
| Node | Variant | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
plan | todo | Plans a todo in a calendar using calendar free busy |
plan | todo slot | Plans a todo in a calendar using predefined slot capacity |
plan | event | Plans an event in a calendar using calendar free busy |
plan | event slot | Plans an event in a calendar using predefined slot capacity |
Most Bot templates and Bot apps will only allow you to use only one variant in your bot since depending on which node variant you'll use, certain configuration needs to be in place beforehand.
The following screenshot shows where to find the node variants. When you can only use one of the Node variants, you will simply see "Plan" without a sub menu.
The four different node variants are almost identical to each other in they way they are used within your Flow and the properties to configure. See node type Plan for more details.
Conversation strategy options
This node allows for four different conversation strategies for eliciting the plan:
| Strategy | Description |
|---|---|
directly suggest 1 option | The bot will directly propose the first available option to which the user only has to reply with yes or no. When answering no, the bot will propose the next available option. |
directly suggest multiple options | The bot will directly propose a couple of options out of which the user can choose. The user can also ask for more options after which the bot will present the next couple of slots. |
first ask before suggesting 1 option | The bot will ask for the user's preferred date and time first before proposing an option that comes closest to the user's preference. The user can then answer with either yes or no. |
first ask before suggesting multiple options | The bot will ask for the user's preferred date and time first before proposing a couple of options that come close to the user's preference. |
Variables
In order to work with this data this skill is producing, the skill introduces the following variables to your Flow designer. They can be used to interpolate with your texts and questions in your Flow.
| Variable | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
Plan date | Start date of the plan (friendly formatted) | Monday 5 January |
Plan ISO | Start date and time in ISO format | 2014-01-05T10:00:00Z |
Plan datetime | Friendly formatted start date and time | Monday 5 January at 10:00 |
Plan day | Name of the start date (relative) | Tomorrow |
Plan time | Start time of the plan | 10:00 |
Plan until | End time of the plan | 11:00 |
Plan until ISO | End date and time in ISO format | 2014-01-05T11:00:00Z |
Calendars
Depending on you particular Bot App you might be using Calendars as resources. Some Bot Apps allow you to integrate with third party calendars. But by default the Platform offers its own Calendar database as well. There are two types of Calendars. Calendars to show the outcome of Calendar actions of the Bot, like appointments or todo's. And Calendars that are used as input for determining Slot Capacity.
Calendars for planning outcomes (Events and Todo's), see Calendars
Calendars for planning input (Slot Capacity), see Calendars content
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