At certain points in a flow, you may wish to enforce user authorization.

You accomplish this by doing the following:

1. On the states where you want to enforce authorization, set the Requires Authorization property to True. This property is on the General tab of the state's property inspector.

   If a user that reaches such a state hasn't authorized yet, the Authorize using OAuth state is invoked, and then the flow invokes the state that required authorization.

2. Create an authorization component and map it to the flow's Authorize User standard transition event:
   1. Select the flow and then select the flow's Flow tab.
   2. Double-click the Events tile for the flow to expand it.
   3. Mouse over the Authorize User tile, click the ellipsis (…) button that appears, and select Add State.
   4. From the Security category of the template picker, select a component, provide a name for the state, and click Insert.

      See Security Templates for details of each of the available templates.

   5. In the component's property inspector, configure the component's properties, including its transition actions.

You can use the auto-numbering feature to prefix buttons and list options with numbers in your responses.

When users can’t use tap gestures, they can still trigger the button’s postback actions by entering a number. This feature is particularly helpful for text channels.

You configure auto numbering at the skill level.

To configure auto numbering:

1. In the left navigation of the skill, select .
2. Select the Configuration tab.
3. Set the value of Enable Auto Numbering on Postback Actions in Task Flows.

   If you want to turn on auto numbering for all channels, set the value to true.

   If you want to turn auto numbering on only for certain channels, provide an expression to determine which channels will get auto numbering. For example, to turn on auto numbering only for Twilio channels, you would enter:

   ${(system.channelType=='twilio')?then('true','false')}

You can keep ensure that users don't get stuck on a step in a dialog flow by configuring that component to limit the number of times it repeats a prompt to the user.

The maxPrompts property limits the number of times that Common Response components can prompt the user when they can’t match the input value to any of the values defined for the entity or input type that’s referenced by the variable property. You can use this property to prevent your dialog from going in circles when users repeatedly enter invalid values. You can set the maximum number of prompts using an integer . The dialog moves onto the next state if the user enters a valid value before reaching this limit. Otherwise, the dialog transitions to the state defined by the cancel action.

You can use resource bundles to store any user-visible strings that you add to your dialog flow.

You reference resource bundle message keys through the variable rb. A reference to a simple resource bundle message takes either of the following two forms:

• ${skill.system.rb.RB_ENTRY_NAME}
• ${rb.RB_ENTRY_NAME}

For more on resource bundles, including information on creating the resource bundle entries themselves and using complex message formats, see Resource Bundles for Skills.

Tip:

Autocompletion helps you select the resource bundles referenced in Apache FreeMarker expressions.

In dialog flows, you can also create create input forms.

Sometimes an input form is the quickest and least error-prone way of collecting user information. Rather than a subjecting users to a volley of questions, your skill can guide users to providing valid input by sending them forms that contain input elements like text input fields, time and date pickers and toggle switches.

In your skill, you can define customer parameters to be referenced from dialog flows.

After you have published the skill, you can change the values of these parameters (though you can not change other parameter details or add or delete parameters).

Custom parameters are exposed as skill.system.config variables for use in the dialog flow definition. For example, a custom parameter named faHostName would be accessed with the following expression:

${skill.system.config.faHostName}

If you want to be able to set the value for a skill's parameter in the digital assistant that you add the skill to, preface the parameter name with da. (including the dot (.)). For example, you could use da.faHostName as the name for a parameter for a host name.

Using this approach, you can define parameters with the same names in multiple skills, add all of those skills to a digital assistant, and then set the values for the shared parameters in one place in the digital assistant.

To access a parameter from a custom component, define an input parameter in the custom component and then pass the value of the skill parameter to it.

You can import and export Visual Mode dialog flows using the Import Flow and Export Selected Flow options from the More menu.