How to make a rest api call in microsoft bot framework

Question

I need a bot that takes users input, uses it as an id to some third party rest api call and posts back a response. I've looked through Microsoft documentation but didn't find any examples on how to program that request-response process.

Any examples or useful links would be appreciated

Answer 1

As Ashwin said, A bot is just a web API and you are just sending/receiving requests as you would with any web API. Below is some documentation that should help get you started.

Basic Overview
Create a bot with the Bot Connector service
API Reference

Answer 2

Adding to Jason's answer, since you wanted to make a REST api call, take a look at this code :

public class RootDialog : IDialog<object>
{
    public Task StartAsync(IDialogContext context)
    {
        context.Wait(MessageReceivedAsync);

        return Task.CompletedTask;
    }

    private async Task MessageReceivedAsync(IDialogContext context, IAwaitable<object> result)
    {
        var activity = await result as Activity;

        // User message
        string userMessage = activity.Text;
        try
        {
            using (HttpClient client = new HttpClient())
            {
                //Assuming that the api takes the user message as a query paramater
                string RequestURI = "YOUR_THIRD_PARTY_REST_API_URL?query=" + userMessage ;
                HttpResponseMessage responsemMsg = await client.GetAsync(RequestURI);
                if (responsemMsg.IsSuccessStatusCode)
                {
                    var apiResponse = await responsemMsg.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();

                    //Post the API response to bot again
                    await context.PostAsync($"Response is {apiResponse}");

                }
            }
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {

        }
        context.Wait(MessageReceivedAsync);
    }
}

Once you get the input from user, you can make a REST call and then after you get the response back from API, post it back to the user using the context.PostAsync method.