index.md

Introduction

Here is a quick guide to get familiar with craft ai.

The material for this tutorial is a web application that will browse reddit posts and match the titles to the names of state capitals from all over the world. When there is a match, the application will connect to the OpenWeatherMap API, retrieve the current weather for the corresponding capital and display it on a map.

Getting ready

Requirements

• A modern browser such as Chrome 45, Firefox 39 or Safari 9,
• A GitHub account.

Setup

Before running the tutorials, you will need to create your own craft ai project. Do not worry, the content is publicly available, you only need to make a personal copy that you can edit. To do so, simply follow these steps:

• go to the craft ai workbench,
• log in with your GitHub account,
• click on the + button next to the 'tutorials' project,

Now let's open the project you just created by clicking the pencil button.

From the project explorer that appears on the left of the page, open the craft_project.json file with the cog icon. You will end up on the settings page which will display your personal Application ID and Application secret associated to your craft ai project. Keep those items handy since they will be needed to run the tutorials.

Running

First launch

Open your browser and go to www.craft.ai/tutorials and click the Run button. You will be prompted to fill in a form with the information about

The first three fields have to do with your craft ai project: your user name (that is, your GitHub user name), the project name (tutorials) and the project branch (by default, master).

In the Behaviors folder field, put "bts/0". This means that the app will create its agents based on the behavior trees that are present in the folder "bts/0" of the project.

The last two fields are to be filled in with the Application ID and Application secret retrieved from your craft ai

Once submitted, the data will appear in the URL like this:

http://www.craft.ai/tutorials
  ?owner=<github_username>
  &project=tutorials
  &branch=master
  &folder=bts/0
  &appid=<craft_ai_app_id>
  &appsecret=<craft_ai_app_secret>

This way you can save the url and when hitting the "Run" button from there, the form will be completed with your data and all you will need to do is hit "Submit".

Playing around

You can play around with the app and see what happens. The controls are the following:

• Run will start an instance and display the posts retrieved from reddit in the web page;
• Stop will stop the currently running instance which will prevent retrieving and displaying any more content, and restore the page to its initial state;

Under the hood

Here's how the application works:

1. A craft ai agent that we will call the reddit manager retrieves the front page of a given subreddit via the GetFrontPage action;
2. If the reddit API returns results, the reddit manager will

• display a summary of the posts returned as thumbnails in the web page,
• and send the results to the city manager agent using craft ai messaging system;

3. The city manager agent will then

• compare the results' titles with a list of capitals (GetCapitals action),
• and for each capital matched
  • display the thumbnail in a dedicated column (DisplayCityThumbnail action),
  • and retrieve the weather and display it on a map (DisplayCityWeather action);

4. When all of the results have been run through, the city manager agent will notify the reddit manager agent;
5. The reddit manager agent will send a request for other posts in the subreddit, and the scenario plays again, until no more posts are found.

Next step

In tutorial 1, you will get to create your own behavior tree!