Typeahead search control in Adaptive Cards Node.js

Code Sample
12/15/2023

This sample shows the feature of typeahead search (static and dynamic) control in Adaptive Cards.

Included Features

Bots
Adaptive Cards (typeahead search)

Interaction with bot

Bot Typeahead Search Adaptive Cards

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).

Typeahead search control in Adaptive Cards: Manifest

Prerequisites

Microsoft Teams is installed and you have an account
NodeJS
dev tunnel or ngrok latest version or equivalent tunnelling solution
Teams Toolkit for VS Code or TeamsFx CLI

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.

Ensure you have downloaded and installed Visual Studio Code
Install the Teams Toolkit extension
Select File > Open Folder in VS Code and choose this samples directory from the repo
Using the extension, sign in with your Microsoft 365 account where you have permissions to upload custom apps
Select Debug > Start Debugging or F5 to run the app in a Teams web client.
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.

Setup

Register a new application in the Microsoft Entra ID – App Registrations portal.
Setup for Bot

In Azure portal, create a Azure Bot resource.
Ensure that you've enabled the Teams Channel
While registering the bot, use https://<your_tunnel_domain>/api/messages as the messaging endpoint. NOTE: When you create app registration, you will create an App ID and App password - make sure you keep these for later.

Setup NGROK

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
```

Setup for code

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/OfficeDev/Microsoft-Teams-Samples.git

Update the .env configuration for the bot to use the MicrosoftAppId and MicrosoftAppPassword (Note the MicrosoftAppId is the AppId created in step 1 (Setup for Bot), the MicrosoftAppPassword is referred to as the "client secret" in step 1 (Setup for Bot) and you can always create a new client secret anytime.)

-Also, set MicrosoftAppType in the .env. (Allowed values are: MultiTenant(default), SingleTenant, UserAssignedMSI)

In a terminal, navigate to samples/bot-type-ahead-search-adaptive-cards/nodejs
Install modules
```
npm install
```
Run your bot at the command line:
```
npm start
```
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 <<YOUR-MICROSOFT-APP-ID>> (depending on the scenario the Microsoft App Id may occur multiple times in the manifest.json)
- Edit the manifest.json for validDomains with base Url domain. E.g. if you are using ngrok it would be https://1234.ngrok-free.app then your domain-name will be 1234.ngrok-free.app and if you are using dev tunnels then your domain will be like: 12345.devtunnels.ms.
- Zip up the contents of the appManifest folder to create a manifest.zip (Make sure that zip file does not contains any subfolder otherwise you will get error while uploading your .zip package)
- Upload the manifest.zip to Teams (In Teams Apps/Manage your apps click "Upload an app". Browse to and Open the .zip file. At the next dialog, click the Add button.)
- Add the app in personal/groupchat/team scope (supported scopes)

Note: If you are facing any issue in your app, please uncomment this line and put your debugger for local debug.

Running the sample

Use the bot command staticsearch to get the card with static typeahead search control and use bot command dynamicsearch to get the card with dynamic typeahead search control.

Static search: Static typeahead search allows users to search from values specified within input.choiceset in the Adaptive Card payload.

Dynamic search: Dynamic typeahead search is useful to search and select data from large data sets. The data sets are loaded dynamically from the dataset specified in the card payload.