Currently, when making and testing a bot, it is only possible to preview it from the very start. With a short bot this is fine, but if you have a lengthy bot, with lots of branches, etc, it can be time consuming to have to go from the very top every time.
Is it possible to start viewing from any chosen gambit?
You can do two things. First, is to simply connect your starting gambit directly to the gambit you would like to start testing from. This requires the initial interaction and then you are into test. As long as you don’t deploy your bot, it will not effect your currently deployed version. This is currently the best way to test new additions that are integrated into a complex bot. The second option is to keep the section separate from your active bot, deploy the bot, and use the code ?_startgid=XX on the end of your bot URL (where XX is the gambit number you would like to start from. I personally use this method because it allows my to jump to the gambit of choice quickly and my users still don’t have access. This is how I test 100+ gambit bots all the time.
There has been discussion about being able to reassign the starting gambit, and I believe they are working on it. Maybe there could be a feature added to preview that allowed gambit jumps, but it has been practically a non-issue for me.
Hi @Yorkieman,
Thanks for the question. I agree this is an important feature when the conversation flow is big and complex and you want to test it more efficiently. Apart of the @Levi’s solutions, which I use as well, I am thinking of making an easier way to preview the Bot conversation from any gambit, by simply clicking on that gambit, while the preview sidebar window is open in the Dashboard. The preview sidebar window was designed in this from the beginning, to allow for this kind of control.
So when this feature is built, when the preview sdebar window is open, and you click on a gambit, then instead of opening the gambit modal for configuration, it will just reset and restart the conversation from that gambit. this will make the testing within the preview sidebar window a lot quick and easy.
Will update this thread once we release this feature.