Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
 
 
page_type description products languages extensions urlFragment
sample
This sample app demonstrate how to use Messaging Extensions Search
office-teams
office
office-365
python
contentType createdDate
samples
12-12-2019 13:38:25
officedev-microsoft-teams-samples-bot-message-extension-python

Teams Messaging Extensions Search

Messaging Extensions are a special kind of Microsoft Teams application that is support by the Bot Framework v4.

There are two basic types of Messaging Extension in Teams: Search-based and Action-based. This sample illustrates how to build a Search-based Messaging Extension.

Included Features

  • Bots
  • Message Extensions
  • Search Commands

Interaction with Messaging Extension

msgext-search

Try it yourself - experience the App in your Microsoft Teams client

Please find below demo manifest which is deployed on Microsoft Azure and you can try it yourself by uploading the app package (.zip file link below) to your teams and/or as a personal app. (Sideloading must be enabled for your tenant, see steps here).

Teams Messaging Extensions Search: Manifest

Prerequisites

  • Microsoft Teams is installed and you have an account
  • Python SDK version 3.7
  • dev tunnel or ngrok latest version or equivalent tunnelling solution

Run the app (Using Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code)

The simplest way to run this sample in Teams is to use Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.

  1. Ensure you have downloaded and installed Visual Studio Code
  2. Install the Teams Toolkit extension and Python Extension
  3. Select File > Open Folder in VS Code and choose this samples directory from the repo
  4. Press CTRL+Shift+P to open the command box and enter Python: Create Environment to create and activate your desired virtual environment. Remember to select requirements.txt as dependencies to install when creating the virtual environment.
  5. Using the extension, sign in with your Microsoft 365 account where you have permissions to upload custom apps
  6. Select Debug > Start Debugging or F5 to run the app in a Teams web client.
  7. In the browser that launches, select the Add button to install the app to Teams.

If you do not have permission to upload custom apps (sideloading), Teams Toolkit will recommend creating and using a Microsoft 365 Developer Program account - a free program to get your own dev environment sandbox that includes Teams.

Run the app (Manually Uploading to Teams)

Note these instructions are for running the sample on your local machine, the tunnelling solution is required because the Teams service needs to call into the bot.

  1. Clone the repository

    git clone https://github.com/OfficeDev/Microsoft-Teams-Samples.git
  2. Run ngrok - point to port 3978

    ngrok http 3978 --host-header="localhost:3978"

    Alternatively, you can also use the dev tunnels. Please follow Create and host a dev tunnel and host the tunnel with anonymous user access command as shown below:

    devtunnel host -p 3978 --allow-anonymous
  3. In Azure portal, create a Azure Bot resource in Azure

    • Use the current https URL you were given by running the tunnelling application. Append with the path /api/messages used by this sample
    • Ensure that you've enabled the Teams Channel
    • If you don't have an Azure account create an Azure free account here
  4. Bring up a terminal, navigate to Microsoft-Teams-Samples\samples\msgext-search\python folder

  5. Activate your desired virtual environment

  6. Install dependencies by running pip install -r requirements.txt in the project folder.

  7. Update the config.py configuration for the bot to use the Microsoft App Id and App Password from the Bot Framework registration. (Note the App Password is referred to as the "client secret" in the azure portal and you can always create a new client secret anytime.)

  8. This step is specific to Teams.

    • Edit the manifest.json contained in the appManifest folder to replace your Microsoft App Id (that was created when you registered your bot earlier) everywhere you see the place holder string ${{AAD_APP_CLIENT_ID}} and ${{TEAMS_APP_ID}} (depending on the scenario the Microsoft App Id may occur multiple times in the manifest.json)
    • Zip up the contents of the appManifest folder to create a manifest.zip
    • Upload the manifest.zip to Teams (in the Apps view click "Upload a custom app")
  9. Run your bot with python app.py

Interacting with the bot in Teams

Note this manifest.json specified that the feature will be available from both the compose and commandBox areas of Teams. Please refer to Teams documentation for more details.

In Teams, the command bar is located at the top of the window. When you at mention the bot what you type is forwarded (as you type) to the bot for processing. By way of illustration, this sample uses the text it receives to query the NuGet package store.

There is a secondary, drill down, event illustrated in this sample: clicking on the results from the initial query will result in the bot receiving another event.

Deploy the bot to Azure

To learn more about deploying a bot to Azure, see Deploy your bot to Azure for a complete list of deployment instructions.

Further reading