Date validation

[emfluenceindia]

I have an intent where a date range is required. I am trying to add a validation rule for the endDate so that it only accepts a value greater than startDate.

How can I set this rule in Alexa console? All I get is the option to set a static value. How can I tell alexa so that it compares with my startDate slot value?

If it is not possible from the console, can I do it in code? Can reprompt be an option?

Please suggest.

[jan]

Not sure how this works with the Dialog Interface, but the AMAZON.Date slot is discusse in this thread:

Dealing with AMAZON.date

I’m attempting to set up a skill that returns the opening ours of some of our sites. Simple enough with Dialogflow, but Alexa is not nice. If the user asks for eg Saturday the AMAZON.date is returning the weekend such as 2019-W25-E rather than the Saturday date eg 2019-06-22. Apparently this is intended behavior according to the Amazon documentation. How are people dealing with this? Is there a way to get just the date and a timestamp like Dialogflow does? I’m interested to use this to conv…

[Andre]

Yes, I would save the startdate as session variable, extract it for validation via moment.js and use their compare methods.

[emfluenceindia]

moment.js

Thank you. I tried the following approach but getting

There was a problem with the requested skill’s response

async ActivityIntent() {
    const startDate = this.$session.$data.sessionStartDate !== undefined ? this.$session.$data.sessionStartDate :  this.$inputs.startDate.value;
    const endDate = this.$session.$data.sessionEndDate !== undefined ? this.$session.$data.sessionEndDate : this.$inputs.endDate.value; // I intentionally put an earlier date here to test.
    
    const tf = moment(startDate).isBefore(endDate);

    if(!tf) {
        this.$session.$data.sessionStartDate = startDate;
        this.$session.$data.sourceIntentName = "ActivityIntent";
        return this.toIntent("DateValidatorIntent");
    } else {
        // go on with the actual logic.
    }
},

async DateValidatorIntent() {
    const newEndDate = this.$inputs.reEnterEndDate.value;
    this.$session.$data.sessionEndDate = newEndDate;

    const sourceIntent = this.$session.$data.sourceIntentName;

    return this.toIntent(sourceIntent);
}

Please tell me what I am doing wrong!

[jan]

I think the best way to debug here is to log some of the values and see if there is any error happening somewhere

[emfluenceindia]

@jan console.log is not revealing anything. The only thing I have understood so far is whenever I am using return this.toIntent('ActivityIntent'), i.e. trying to navigate back to ActivityIntent from DateValidatorIntent, the error is coming up.

I also used a catch block like this in DateValidatorIntent intent:

...
catch(e){
   throw(e);
}

with this expectation that it would tell me what exactly is happening. But all I am getting is that good old message “Problem in requested skill’s response”.

[rubenaeg]

Hi @emfluenceindia , could you please log some data and post the result here? For example startDate, endDate, tf and newEndDate. Is it possible that your logic creates an infinite loop?