Using task modules with bots for Microsoft Teams

Key Takeaways

task modules can be a vote from a custom tab in microsoft teams from anywhere using a deep link and from bots but task modules offer developers a way to collect user input with a bot as well and keep everyone in the channel from seeing what other users are doing so in this section you're going to learn how to use task modules with bots and microsoft teams how to process task modules submissions and bots and how to develop bots with task modules i'm going to skip this slide so far throughout this module you've learned how to create task modules as html web pages and adaptive cards and you've learned how to use the task modules from tabs as well as invoking them using microsoft teams support for deep links another way that you can use task modules is from bots bots present a unique challenge in that there's no user interface to interact with a bot rather all communication is typically done using conversations microsoft's bot framework and the microsoft teams sdks have added support for not only invoking task modules but also to handle the action.submit event in the case where task modules are submit information back to the bot so let's talk about invoking task modules from bots now recall from a previous conversations the process for invoking a task module is to call the submit task method on the microsoft teams javascript sdk this method won't work when invoking the task module from the bot because the bot's code is running as a web service external to microsoft teams instead you have two options for invoking a task module from a bot one option is to use a deep link that is included in the message posted to the conversations tab in microsoft teams by the bot when a user selects this link it will invoke the task module the other option is to send a special type of a message to the bot framework and therefore to microsoft teams and this can be sent from a card action or from the bot itself to create the message set the button's type to invoke the value type property of the button should be set to task fetch or action.submit if you're using an adaptive card when the user selects the button it will send an http post invoke message to the bot and the microsoft teams sdk automatically processes all of the invoke messages and directs them to one of two handlers either the handle teams task module fetch is going to be called when the value.type property of the message is a task fetch or the handle team's task module submit is called when the value type property is task slash submit both of these methods return an object of type task module response and this object tells microsoft teams to either display a message which is a type colon message or to display another task module which is type call and continue the details of the response either as a message or a task module are included in the value property of the returned object so for example as you see here on the slide the following response from either of the two handlers to display a task module message either where the type equals message or the type is continue for to add in or to show another task module