I am starting to develop a bot for Teams and I do not understand the various channel offerings. I know I need to add Microsoft Teams to the channel list in Azure for the bot to be able to message people through chat channels, but I can't figure out how to allow the bot to communicate with an API that is hosted in AWS. Maybe Direct Line is what I'm supposed to use, but the documentation is very unclear. Here is what I can find about Direct Line:
Direct Line. This is the standard channel offering of Direct Line. It works by default with bot templates via the Azure portal, bots from the Bot Builder Samples, and bots created with the Azure CLI. This is the Direct Line best suited in the majority of the cases. See Connect a bot to Direct Line.
If anything, I became more confused after reading that. It raises more questions than it answered. If Direct Line is supposed to allow me to communicate with third-party APIs, I don't know how to get started even if I enable it. The BotBuilder repository documentation does not mention Direct Line channels, at least not in an obvious way, so that hasn't been much help either.
I have very little clue about how this works even though I spent my whole day reading about it. Deploying a bot to Teams that can make a call to another API is much more difficult than I anticipated. All I want to do is say @bot command and have it call an API to make a GET request. Once I am able to do that, I will be able to develop the rest of the application, but using the requests module in Python has not worked and I don't know why.
Anything you can offer about how this should work would be greatly appreciated.
CodePudding user response：
I'm not totally clear either on what Direct Line is for, but from what I can understand it would be if you want to include a bot experience in your own custom app, like a desktop app with a "chat" feature. It's definitely not needed for Teams though - you only need the Teams channel.
With regards calling an API from within your bot, essentially your bot is just a standard web service - it can do anything any other kind of web service / web api can do, e.g. calling a 3rd party API.
CodePudding user response：
Direct Line, as the name implies, is a direct line of communication to an Azure bot. Essentially, it is a set of APIs that you can use to communicate with an Azure Bot outside the set of provided channels. If you are building a custom application that none of the other channels such as Web Chat, Teams, Email, etc. would be appropriate for, then you can use the Direct Line API to send and receive messages to and from a hosted bot with REST calls. The API reference in the documentation explains how to connect to and use Direct Line. You would implement these calls into your application as you would calls to any other REST API and display the responses in whatever manner fits your use case.
The key intuition here is that Direct Line is only for communicating with the bot. It has nothing to do with connecting to outside services. Communicating with 3rd party services would be accomplished in the same manner as any other application. I don't know how you've implemented your application or what service you're connecting to, but I would suggest you double check that your calls to that service work outside your bot using Postman or curl before attempting to implement them into the bot.
Your use case would appear to be the Microsoft Teams channel, and not Direct Line.