Stage One - Tree Building

Build Tree

Stella allows multiple channels to share the same tree(s). That means your initial tree(s) can be reused in the future. With that in mind, it is wise to build your conversation tree(s) in a way that they can easily be scaled up & deployed quickly in the future. Here are some quick tips to improve the re-usability of your conversation tree:

• Apply Channel-wide Metadata to your chatbot conversation tree if possible, so that you can change the variables (Metadata) directly in a channel instead of editing all the tree nodes.
• Make sure all the trees and tree nodes in your build is accounted for.

Duplicate Tree

If you are making minor changes to your existing chatbot build and do not want the changes to be reflected on the production environment immediately, you can consider duplicating the existing production tree and make changes on it. When you duplicate a tree, only the tree structure will be duplicated. It is important to know that certain components (i.e. Trigger/Action/Response) in the node inspector will still be shared between the production tree and the duplicated tree.

In order to avoid any unintentional changes to the production environment, after you made any changes to a component (i.e. Trigger/Action/Response), you should always select "Save as" instead of "Save". "Save as" allows you to save a new copy of the component, whereas "Save" will update the original component.

• Use "Save as" instead of "Save" for any edits on existing node inspector component (i.e. Trigger/Action/Response) to avoid unintentional changes to the production chatbot.

Import & Export

Import & Export refers to exporting an existing tree build JSON and importing it back to Stella. This creates a completely duplicated build consisting of a copy of all node inspector components in the tree (i.e. a duplicated set of the same triggers/actions/responses). This means that it is inherently safer to edit an imported tree than a duplicated tree. However, the downside is that you will have an extra set of everything which some of them would be redundant.

• Export original build and import it back to your Stella App.