Use Entities from CDS

[Arjan_M]

In Virtual Agents we can create entities manually, but it would be great to fill these dynamically from CDS. Could be a direct link with CDS or actions in Power Automate to copy values from CDS to Virtual Agent entities. Would be great for values that come from business applications, like products for example.

[Jeff_Zhang]

Thanks for the great idea Arjan_M. 

Can you help to elaborate a bit more on your scenario? Like how would you like to discover the entity from the CDS and what "fields" you would like to use when you mention "products".

Thanks, Jeff [MSFT]

[Arjan_M]

Hi Jeff,

The scenario I was thinking about is very similar to the standard example in Virtual Agents. So a sales support kind of bot, but with hundreds of product (instead of 3) in the example. To make this useable and maintainable you don't want to have to change the bot every time the product catalog changes, so you want integration with a PIM system (i.e. the CDS). At least to update the list of products, categories, product families, etc. And the relation between these. So this way the bot can provide answers based on this information (structure/hierarchy). 

For example; I ask the bot I'm looking for a laptop. The bot can ask some more details. This can be based on entities in the bot, but I could see scenario's where this can be dynamic based in information like categories, tags or subjects from the CDS. Resulting is a specific product which the customer wants to get. 

At this point the bot needs a unique identifying ID (product id, or CDS GUID) to execute the action using Power Automate.

In the ideal case you want the entire data model and relations from CDS available in the Virtual Agent. This can probably be build using Virtual Agent Actions, Power Automate and CDS and just execute queries on CDS every time an answer is needed. This probably doesn't perform very well and gives a problem with the API limits.

By loading en entity from CDS in the entity for the Virtual Agent we create a "cache" in the Virtual Agent. Fields that would be usefull are the internal ID, a logical ID (product number), Title/Name and Description, and some kind of tag or category option to be able to group things together.

This could work for every CDS entity and not just products. 

[Akhodjaev]

HI, I have similar view on this. In Custom Entities, first of all it does not seem to catch similar or items when user enters it. even one letter change was not accepted. so it really looks for the whole list and validates if the user input exist in the list or not. if that is the case. current expectation is to enter manually thousands of possibilities... instead, it would be good if it is linked to some table and updated thru a flow or something, so that Entity has most current data... @Jeff_Zhang

[Jeff_Zhang]

Thanks for the feedback and for explaining the scenarios. I've added it to our backlog. 

Folks, please vote on it if you have a similar request. It will help us prioritize. 

-Jeff [MSFT]

[Aya_]

Hi , I just wanted to check if they developed the idea of custom entities .

@Jeff_Zhang @Arjan_M @Akhodjaev