Controllers

Controllers in your application control the logic of your skill, they respond to alexa voxaEvents, external resources, manipulate the input and give proper responses using your Model, Views and Variables.

States come in one of two ways, they can be an object with a transition:

app.onState('HelpIntent', {
  tell: "Help"
});

Or they can be a function that gets a voxaEvent object:

app.onState('launch', (voxaEvent) => {
  return { tell: 'LaunchIntent.OpenResponse' };
});

Your state should respond with a transition. The transition is a plain object that can take directives, to and flow keys.

onState also takes a third parameter which can be used to limit which intents a controller can respond, for example

app.onState('shouldSendEmail?', {
  sayp: "All right! An email has been sent to your inbox",
  flowp: "terminate"
}, "YesIntent");

app.onState('shouldSendEmail?', {
  sayp: "No problem, is there anything else i can help you with?",
  flowp: "yield"
}, "NoIntent");

The onIntent helper

For the simple pattern of having a controller respond to an specific intent the framework provides the onIntent helper

app.onIntent('LaunchIntent', (voxaEvent) => {
  return { tell: 'LaunchIntent.OpenResponse' };
});

If you receive a Display.ElementSelected type request, you could use the same approach for intents and state. Voxa receives this type of request and turns it into DisplayElementSelected Intent

app.onIntent('DisplayElementSelected', (voxaEvent) => {
  return { tell: 'DisplayElementSelected.OpenResponse' };
});

Keep in mind that controllers created with onIntent won’t accept transitions from other states with a different intent