Background
I’m a part of team developing a chatbot based on the Pandorabots platform. We are subscribed and are using AIaas(using the PHP module to access the PB API). While the pb-cli and other functions work well, there is small query that I could not find the answer to.

Query
One of the functions of the bot is to fetch information externally : sometimes over the internet, sometimes from a database. In the past(for a personal project) I used Rivescript and by writing small javascript snippets in conjunction with a php script, I was able to fetch data externally. How can I achieve a similar functionality using Pandorabots? The PB blog post linked below presents a similar concept to the one we’re trying to achieve :

Handling Sensitive Data-PB blog

But I cannot figure out how to use the mustache scripting engine within the AIaas. I would really appreciate if someone could explain to me how to use the mustache (or any other scripting language) to access data external from with AIaas.

Hi Siddarth,

You cannot “execute scripts” from within your bot on AIaaS. The bot will simply treat your script or Mustache template as a string. Whatever you choose to do with that string is up to you and your client application:

Input: TEST
Output: Here is a mustache template: {{ foo }}

When you receive this response, your application can compile the template with the appropriate data (from a database or elsewhere), and return the compiled string to the user.

If you want to use Mustache, there is a PHP library. I only chose Mustache as an example for that post - use any template engine you’d like! The purpose was to show how you might work with APIs alongside AIaaS, rather than from within it.

Thankyou for your response. So potentially javascript can also work in similar fashion? Also, will the AIML engine ignore any constructs of the templating engine,for instance delimiters and/or tags? Or do I have to use it as below (example for embedding an HTML url within a response)?

You can use the normal.substitution file to handle these types of things.

Substitutions and Sentence Splitting