Introduction:

This blog post will help you learn how to transport your bots or bot versions across your SAP Conversational AI enterprise tenants and the community tenant. This feature provides the flexibility to copy your bots or bot versions from one tenant to another without the need to re-build them from scratch in the target tenant.

Case Description:

Let’s say you have an existing bot in a tenant (referred as source tenant) which you want to replicate or copy into another tenant (referred as target tenant) without developing the bot from the scratch. Using this feature, you can copy the selected bot by keeping the source intact.

Overview:

Bot transport mainly involves two steps:

1. Export – Export the selected bot version from the source tenant and download into a .zip file
2. Import – Import the file into the target tenant which creates new bot in the target tenant or adds the imported version into the existing bot if the bot already exists.

You can transport bots either via the user interface or use APIs.

The option to use APIs is only available for enterprise tenants, however the UI feature can be used for both community and enterprise tenants.

For more details, please refer to Transporting Bots Using APIs.

In this post, we will discuss the process of transporting the bot from the UI.

Bot Transport from the Platform UI

As an organization administrator or an account owner, you can transport your bot from your organization or your user account. Please note that:

• Org admins can export the bot version and import into an organization
• Bot owner can export the bot version and import into the user account

For more details, please refer to the Transfer Bots From User Interface.

Export a Bot Version from UI

1. Go to the source tenant and open the bot that you want to export. Select the required version and click Export in the top right corner of the screen.

The number to the right of the export button indicates the number of export requests that have been triggered for this bot.

Note:

You can only see your own export requests and not the ones triggered by others.

Click the number to the right of the export button to see the details of the export request/s for all the versions.

1. After the file is exported, the download icon in the Action column is active.
2. Click the download icon.

A .zip file named as export_<UUID>.zip is downloaded and is available in your local (downloads) folder.

The file should be downloaded and saved within the next twelve hours of generation after which the export request will expire. You need to re-trigger the export process to download the file if it wasn’t downloaded earlier.

Note:

You can change the name of the file as per your choice but the file type must be .zip.

The content of the file must not be modified, else the import will fail.

Import a Bot Version from UI – How it works:

1. Go to the target tenant and in your profile page, click Import on the top right.

The number to the right of the import button indicates the number of import requests that have been triggered for this account.

1. Upload the .zip file from your local folder.
2. Click the number to the right of the import button. You can see the details of all the import request/s triggered for this account (including the ones triggered by others).

Note:

All the import requests triggered by other bot developers or org administrators are displayed.

1. After the import is completed, refresh the page. The imported bot is visible in your profile page.

For more information, please refer to this video:

Conclusion:

I hope this helps to understand the bot transport functionality in detail. This greatly eases the burden of bot building, especially in multi tenant landscape scenarios (like development, test, production) and reduce effort.

For complete information about this feature, you can refer to the guide Transporting Bots Across Tenants

Happy Transporting!

For more information about SAP Conversational AI: