I'm a relative newbie building an assistant using the Watson Assistant (Lite) GUI and am running into a lot of limitations. Is there a reference for IBM's implementation of Spring Expression Language? (All the resources I have found are wrapped in Java and it's hard to abstract it to context variables and conditional responses.)

And, a related question: is it possible to create user-defined functions in SpEL?

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Allen Nugent
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#WatsonAssistant

Allen,

  I am assuming that you are aware of the Spring framework documentation, and that you are asking about IBM specific limitations in our implementation of the spring framework.  I am not sure about those.

  As far as user defined functions are concerned, my guess is that you would need to define them first, and then execute them.  That would tend to make the code associated with any particular dialog node more lengthy and tougher to maintain.  In cases like this it can often be more beneficial to use some sort of webhook.  If you are doing a lot of this, it might be better to look at building your own orchestration engine - something that can help handle these more complex data transformations and control operations in a way that is easier to implement and maintain.

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Daniel Toczala
Community Leader and Customer Success Manager - Watson
dtoczala@us.ibm.com
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The Expression language methods documentation might be useful to you.

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Michelle Miller
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