I have been helping this community for years and I have posted over 2000 times, but I am finally at my breaking point with the Dialog Engine Bot Flow variable management! We have a multi-bot architecture where we use one bot for authentication and then transfer to another bot for specific service tasks. Why is there still no native support for ‘Global Bot Variables’? I am tired of having to write the same ‘Participant Data’ to a DataTable just to read it back in a second bot. It is slow, it adds unnecessary API calls, and it makes the entire workforce management scheduling for our bot maintainers a complete nightmare. Does anyone have a cleaner workaround that does not involve polluting the DataTables?
I understand your frustration, especially from an accessibility standpoint. We try to ensure our bot flows meet WCAG standards by keeping them simple, and these DataTable workarounds definitely add unnecessary complexity. While there are no ‘Global’ variables in the bot engine, you can utilize the ‘Session Attributes’ in the Web Messaging Guest API if you are building a custom frontend. You can store the user’s data in the browser session and pass it into each bot flow as an ‘Input’ variable. This keeps the data within the digital channel session without hitting the backend DataTables. It is a much cleaner way to maintain state across multiple bot turns.
Good afternoon. We encountered this exact same limitation when we were migrating several complex IVR structures from NICE CXone. CXone had a much more mature variable inheritance model. For our Genesys Cloud enterprise clients, we recommend utilizing ‘Secure Data Actions’ to a lightweight Redis cache. It sounds like more work, but it is actually faster than DataTables and much more secure for sensitive PII. You can generate a ‘Session GUID’ in your first Architect flow and use it as a key to share data between any number of bots or voice flows. It is the enterprise standard for high-volume, multi-bot environments.