Log the conversation to Azure CosmosDB with nodejs - node.js

Question

We're trying to save the conversations for analytics purposes, and since we're using CosmosDB to store the User and Conversation States, we would like to log the conversations there too.
I've been able to find ways to do so using BlobStorage but that isn't really possible for us.
Is there any way or implementation that we can follow/use to log into CosmosDB?
Thanks

Answer 1

I created a custom logger to do this. This is implemented in index.js via TranscriptLoggerMiddleware (part of botbuilderlibrary). The main additions to index.js here are:
const { TranscriptLoggerMiddleware } = require('botbuilder')
const { CustomLogger } = require('./helpers/CustomLogger');
const logger = new TranscriptLoggerMiddleware(new CustomLogger());
adapter.use(logger);
For the logger itself, because of the speed of the request/response, we found that often only one part of the conversation was getting logged. So we created a for-loop delay function. I've tried other methods such as awaiting a promise, but it didn't fix the issue. This has been rock solid after adding the delay. Here is the full custom logger code:
// Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
// Licensed under the MIT License.
const { CosmosDbStorage } = require('botbuilder-azure');
class CustomLogger {
// Set up Cosmos Storage
constructor() {
this.transcriptStorage = new CosmosDbStorage({
serviceEndpoint: process.env.ACTUAL_SERVICE_ENDPOINT,
authKey: process.env.ACTUAL_AUTH_KEY,
databaseId: process.env.DATABASE,
collectionId: 'bot-transcripts'
});
this.conversationLogger = {};
this.msDelay = 250;
}
async logActivity(activity) {
if (!activity) {
throw new Error('Activity is required.');
}
// Log only if this is type message
if (activity.type === 'message') {
// Check if activity contains a card
if (activity.attachments) {
var logTextDb = `${activity.from.name}: ${activity.attachments[0].content.text}`;
} else {
var logTextDb = `${activity.from.name}: ${activity.text}`;
}
if (activity.conversation) {
var id = activity.conversation.id;
if (id.indexOf('|') !== -1) {
id = activity.conversation.id.replace(/\|.*/, '');
}
// Get today's date for datestamp
var currentDate = new Date();
var day = currentDate.getDate();
var month = currentDate.getMonth()+1;
var year = currentDate.getFullYear();
var datestamp = year + '-' + month + '-' + day;
var fileName = `${datestamp}_${id}`;
var timestamp = Math.floor(Date.now()/1);
// Prep object for CosmosDB logging
if (!(fileName in this.conversationLogger)) {
this.conversationLogger[fileName] = {};
this.conversationLogger[fileName]['botName'] = process.env.BOTNAME;
}
this.conversationLogger[fileName][timestamp] = logTextDb;
let updateObj = {
[fileName]:{
...this.conversationLogger[fileName]
}
}
// Add delay to ensure messages logged sequentially
await this.wait(this.msDelay);
// Write to CosmosDB
try {
let result = await this.transcriptStorage.write(updateObj);
console.log(`Transcript written successfully to DB\n\n`);
} catch(err) {
console.log(`There was an error writing the transcript to DB`);
console.log(err);
}
}
}
}
async wait(milliseconds) {
var start = new Date().getTime();
for (var i = 0; i < 1e7; i++) {
if ((new Date().getTime() - start) > milliseconds) {
break;
}
}
}
}
exports.CustomLogger = CustomLogger;