ALM for Chatbots created using Power Virtual Agents

In the earlier articles we explored Power Virtual Agents and its capabilities integrating with Power Automate Flow and Adaptive Cards. In this article we will look at the option available for backup support and packaging the bots to share them across environments.

Chatbots created using Power Virtual Agents are now Solution aware, this means that you can include all of the components of Chatbots within a solution. When you start the process of creating a Chatbot from the maker portal, it does not allow you to select the solution within which you would like to create the chatbot. You can check the solution in which the components have been added by clicking on the bot icon in bot maker canvas at the top right next to the settings gear.

Click on View in Power Apps to navigate to the solution and view all the components associated with the Chat bot.

And yeah!!! It is the new solution explorer you see here.

Here you see all the components that we had worked on in our earlier articles the topic as well as the variables that we had created in the bot flow.

Now let us create a new solution and using the Add Existing option add the chat bot to the new solution that we can then export and share with users to move this bot from one environment to another.

We now see the Chatbot as an option in Add Existing menu

Choose that and select your Chatbot from the list provided

And when you add a chatbot, it auto include all the related components of the Chat bot

If you notice this has added more components than what we saw when we clicked on the View in PowerApps link above – the one above only lists the components that were created or the topics that were modified by us.

Here you see all the sub-components associated with the chat bot. So I had started off with a sample chatbot that already provided multiple topics predefined and I had only modified one of the topics for my needs, what you see here in the above screenshot is all components and topics associated with that chat bot.

It has also included the components that we had created using the Bot Composer in our earlier article

This solution can now be exported using the standard export solution functionality as a managed solution ready for import in another organization.