Using adaptive cards in Copilot Studio to talk to D365F&O
Subhad365
19
User Group Leader
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ReportAdaptive cards are amazing tools available in Copilot Studio, that can turn your boring looking Copilot Chatbot answers look more colorful, vivid and more insightful. Actually, Adaptive Cards are a great way to share information across multiple platforms leveraging JSON, that can turn answer in key-value pairs into any intended format, that include text, images, buttons, and input fields – and what not?!
This article is intended to give you an ideation of getting responses from D365F&O and present them into gorgeous looking Adaptive cards in Copilot Chatbot Sidecars.
To which the Copilot lists out in bullets, the list, using an adaptive card:
Or imagine if I ask the Copilot about the details of a worker like this:
To which the Copilot asks me back:
On giving the personnel number, the Copilot responds like this:
Which is quick snapshot of the worker, indicating his/her name, Email, office address etc. in a much presentable/professional format, using adaptive card.
Here are the steps to implement the same.
Indicating the keywords which might trigger the Copilot topic.
To which I am asking a question back:
I am storing the user response in a local variable called VendAccount.
N.B. I am storing the user answer using an Entity Called ‘User’s entire response’. You can use your Custom entity to store the VendAccount, for better results (for ex: if the user answers: ‘Ok, my vendor number is V-12121’, instead of just ‘V-12121’, which will certainly lead to erroneous results. Using a custom entity that defines the pattern of the vendor number using in your system, is actually a very design).
I am again asking the question to get the legal entity:
I am storing the same in a local variable called company.
At this point, I am calling a Flow which is returning the list of Purchase orders:
Let us now inspect what is written inside this flow.
And then it calls the bearer token generation logic to call the Authentication URL:
And in the next step I am doing a GET to fetch the list of POs:
Note how I am calling the OData endpoint. In this case, I am selecting just column I need (PurchId). To do this, I am calling the Odata like this:
<Base_URL>/data/PurchTableBiEntities?cross-company=true&$select=PurchId&$filter=OrderAccount eq '1003' and dataAreaId 'usmf'
This will give a response like this:
I will now be returning this to the Copilot prompt:
Let us now go back to Copilot Studio.
Click on Variable management >> Parse value:
Here you need to give the input which I am getting from the previous step (response from FLOW):
And then (here comes the trick 😊) I am choosing the selcect type = From Sample Data:
Click on ‘Get Schema and Sample JSON’:
And in the screen that pops up, fill up the JSON value which you got from the above step:
Click on Confirm. And you are done. The step automatically understands that you are trying to get a Record, which I am storing as a variable called ‘poResponse’.
In the card structure that opens up, I am selecting on the ‘Card dessigner’:
The URL: https://adaptivecards.io/designer/ gives a plethora of built-in designs to choose from:
For now, we are going to choose, New Card to continue:
Select Blank Template to begin and you can create the structure here as you wish:
For example, click to add Table or a container or a Factset – anything!!!
For our example, I am using a Container that will get populated with the Purchase Order Ids, which I am getting in the response. Below is the schema:
{
type: "AdaptiveCard",
version: "1.3",
body: [
{
type: "TextBlock",
text: "Purchase orders List",
weight: "bolder",
size: "large"
},
{
type: "Container",
items:
ForAll(Topic.poResponse.value,
{
type: "TextBlock",
text: "- Purchase Order Id: " & PurchId ,
wrap: true
}
)
}
]
}
Few points to note here:
Which I am looping in the counter below, just by saying text: text: "- Purchase Order Id: " & PurchId .
And finally, I am concluding the conversation like this:
That’s it, just publish the changes to make it available to D365F&O front end. Of course you can add more information to your list by selecting more columns (ex: site and warehouse) and displaying them along with Purch Ids in the list.
{
type: "AdaptiveCard",
'$schema': "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
version: "1.3",
body: [
{
type: "TextBlock",
text: "Details of Worker/Employee",
wrap: true,
style: "heading"
},
{
type: "FactSet",
facts: [
{
title: "Name",
value: Topic.hcmWorker.NameAlias
},
{
title: "Email",
value: Topic.hcmWorker.IdentityEmail
},
{
title: "Office",
value: Topic.hcmWorker.AddressStreet & " " & Topic.hcmWorker.AddressCity &" "& Topic.hcmWorker.AddressZipCode & " " & Topic.hcmWorker.AddressCountryRegionId
}
]
}
]
}
Please note the following:
You can choose as many number of columns here as possible, depending on your need.
This article is intended to give you an ideation of getting responses from D365F&O and present them into gorgeous looking Adaptive cards in Copilot Chatbot Sidecars.
What am I trying to do
Let me ask the following to D365F&O:To which the Copilot lists out in bullets, the list, using an adaptive card:
Or imagine if I ask the Copilot about the details of a worker like this:
To which the Copilot asks me back:
On giving the personnel number, the Copilot responds like this:
Which is quick snapshot of the worker, indicating his/her name, Email, office address etc. in a much presentable/professional format, using adaptive card.
Here are the steps to implement the same.
Displaying list in an adaptive card
Step 1
Start defining your copilot studio topic like this:Indicating the keywords which might trigger the Copilot topic.
To which I am asking a question back:
I am storing the user response in a local variable called VendAccount.
N.B. I am storing the user answer using an Entity Called ‘User’s entire response’. You can use your Custom entity to store the VendAccount, for better results (for ex: if the user answers: ‘Ok, my vendor number is V-12121’, instead of just ‘V-12121’, which will certainly lead to erroneous results. Using a custom entity that defines the pattern of the vendor number using in your system, is actually a very design).
I am again asking the question to get the legal entity:
I am storing the same in a local variable called company.
At this point, I am calling a Flow which is returning the list of Purchase orders:
Let us now inspect what is written inside this flow.
Step 2
The flow accepts the input from the user like this:And then it calls the bearer token generation logic to call the Authentication URL:
And in the next step I am doing a GET to fetch the list of POs:
Note how I am calling the OData endpoint. In this case, I am selecting just column I need (PurchId). To do this, I am calling the Odata like this:
<Base_URL>/data/PurchTableBiEntities?cross-company=true&$select=PurchId&$filter=OrderAccount eq '1003' and dataAreaId 'usmf'
This will give a response like this:
I will now be returning this to the Copilot prompt:
Let us now go back to Copilot Studio.
Step 3
I am storing the response as a variable called jsonResponse:Click on Variable management >> Parse value:
Here you need to give the input which I am getting from the previous step (response from FLOW):
And then (here comes the trick 😊) I am choosing the selcect type = From Sample Data:
Click on ‘Get Schema and Sample JSON’:
And in the screen that pops up, fill up the JSON value which you got from the above step:
Click on Confirm. And you are done. The step automatically understands that you are trying to get a Record, which I am storing as a variable called ‘poResponse’.
Step 4
In the final step, I am creating a response and adding an Adaptive card:In the card structure that opens up, I am selecting on the ‘Card dessigner’:
The URL: https://adaptivecards.io/designer/ gives a plethora of built-in designs to choose from:
For now, we are going to choose, New Card to continue:
Select Blank Template to begin and you can create the structure here as you wish:
For example, click to add Table or a container or a Factset – anything!!!
For our example, I am using a Container that will get populated with the Purchase Order Ids, which I am getting in the response. Below is the schema:
{
type: "AdaptiveCard",
version: "1.3",
body: [
{
type: "TextBlock",
text: "Purchase orders List",
weight: "bolder",
size: "large"
},
{
type: "Container",
items:
ForAll(Topic.poResponse.value,
{
type: "TextBlock",
text: "- Purchase Order Id: " & PurchId ,
wrap: true
}
)
}
]
}
Few points to note here:
- I am choosing the version as 1.3, currently the version that Copilot Studio BOT-framework can support is up to 1.3.
- I am using the Type = Container and then I am looping through all the available Purchase Order Ids as ‘ForAll(Topic.poResponse.value’: this will give you the main array element of the response:
Which I am looping in the counter below, just by saying text: text: "- Purchase Order Id: " & PurchId .
- Wrap: true is done, just so as to avoid unnecessary stretching of the result form.
And finally, I am concluding the conversation like this:
That’s it, just publish the changes to make it available to D365F&O front end. Of course you can add more information to your list by selecting more columns (ex: site and warehouse) and displaying them along with Purch Ids in the list.
Displaying results in factbox:
This is an example which I showed you by using employee/worker details. The process is exactly the same as above, only the difference is the card structure which I am using here:{
type: "AdaptiveCard",
'$schema': "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
version: "1.3",
body: [
{
type: "TextBlock",
text: "Details of Worker/Employee",
wrap: true,
style: "heading"
},
{
type: "FactSet",
facts: [
{
title: "Name",
value: Topic.hcmWorker.NameAlias
},
{
title: "Email",
value: Topic.hcmWorker.IdentityEmail
},
{
title: "Office",
value: Topic.hcmWorker.AddressStreet & " " & Topic.hcmWorker.AddressCity &" "& Topic.hcmWorker.AddressZipCode & " " & Topic.hcmWorker.AddressCountryRegionId
}
]
}
]
}
Please note the following:
- I am using the D365F&O OData entity called Workers. And in that I am selecting just the few columns for my example purpose:
You can choose as many number of columns here as possible, depending on your need.
- The Type: Factset is an array, that contains elements called Facts, where you can keep adding information to it, as key-value pairs (ex: employee name, phone number, email, address, etc.)
- The heading is encompassed as a TextBlock, which contains the header/heading of the info.
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