How to integrate your chatbot with a database

In this article we will show you how you can use your chatbot to extract data and send that data to a database by using APIs. We will do that by showing you how to:

Extract data or user input
Set up a database
Send data to a database (POST)

In addition to pushing data to a database, it is also possible to retrieve data from a database (GET). Together, these two are a strong combination for providing automated personalized customer journeys.

Extracting data and user input

Before we start filling our database, we need to extract some data or user input to send to our database. Within the Flow.ai platform there are 2 common places where to find data.

1. User input

The first place to extract data is by using user input. User input can contain valuable information such as an e-mail address, phone number, or name. Our article How to capture user input shows you how to extract that information as a parameter.

2. Payload

Second, you can find a lot of data within the payload. When integrating with messaging channels, such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, some data is already provided by that channel. You can already extract that from the channels metadata without asking for a name or phone number.

Setting up a database

In this example, we’ll be working with a database from Restdb. If you’re using a different database, don’t worry, the concept will be similar.

After creating an account you can set-up your database. In the example below, you will see the database ‘userdata’ that contains 3 fields: name, phone, and email.

Sending data to a database (POST)

To send data from your Flow.ai chatbot to the RestDB database, we’ll be working with APIs. If you’re using RestDB you can access developers mode by clicking the gear/settings icon in the top right. Then head over to API docs -> Javascript. From there, you can copy and paste the code from RestDB to an action in Flow.ai.

The next step is to alter the code in Flow.ai’s Action, so that we can actually send the extracted data to our database. Therefore, we’ll create 3 variables. We check if they exist and if so, we’ll fill those variables. New to actions and coding? Have a look at code best practices


async payload => {
  
  var fullName = "-"
  var phoneNumber = "-"
  var email = "-"
  
  
  // Check if name exists
  if("fullName" in payload.user.profile) {
     fullName = payload.user.profile.fullName
    }


  // Check if phoneNumber 
  if("phoneNumber" in payload.user.profile) {
     phoneNumber = payload.user.profile.phoneNumber
    }

  // Check if the param "email" exists
  if(Array.isArray(payload.params.email)) {
    email = payload.params.email[0].value
    }
  

// API (POST) to send data to database
var request = require("request");

var options = { method: 'POST',
  url: 'https://integratedb-74ce.restdb.io/rest/userdata',
  headers: 
   { 'cache-control': 'no-cache',
     'x-apikey': 'YOUR SECRET API KEY',
     'content-type': 'application/json' },
  body: { 
    name: `${fullName}`, 
    phone: `${phoneNumber}` ,
    email: `${email}` 
  },
  json: true };

request(options, function (error, response, body) {
  if (error) throw new Error(error);

  console.log(body);
});

}