Microsoft 365 Community Adaptive Cards, 16 Jul 2020

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From YouTube: Adaptive Cards community call-July 2020

Description

Hosted by Matt Hidinger and guest Tim Cadenbach, this month's call covered the upcoming Adaptive Cards v1.3 release, which includes the most-requested feature of the past 2 years: Input Validation; introduction of Adaptive Card Studio, a new Visual Studio Code Extension; showcasing of a full card-powered web app.

Resources:
Adaptive Cards https://adaptivecards.io
Adaptive Card Studio https://madewithcards.io

Next call is on Thursday, August 20 at 8am PST https://adaptivecardscommunitycall

Stay connected
Twitter https://twitter.com/microsoft365dev
YouTube https://aka.ms/M365DevYouTube
Blogs https://aka.ms/M365DevBlog

A

Hi everyone I met Heidegger. Thank you for joining the adaptive cards community call. So you found this call. We mentioned early on before the recording started that the calendar series had expired, so people will have to riad it. The new series does not expire, so we hopefully won't have to do this reboot again. But if you have friends, colleagues, that would find this interesting. You will have to kind of reshare the calendar link, AKMs, slash adaptive cards, community call and we're still going so a lot of people's calendar and they thought we might disappeared.

A

We're still going second Thursday of every month at 9:00 a.m. Pacific time. We have some cool topics for today, I'll be doing a quick update on adaptive cards, 1.3 yeah, which some of you have probably seen, but what's really we're calling our input evolution update, so we've got some cool demos to show there and then Tim cotton Bach who has been a longtime fan.

A

It's gonna show off some cooling and also really pushing the envelope on on what you can do, and just kind of I I like to say just getting the wheels spin in on some things, maybe outside the box that just really using adaptive cards for things we we hadn't really seen so Tim. Thank you for joining us yep.

A

Thank you, Matt and so I'll just kind of dive right in so the first one. Once our power fan, Tomas joins I, think he'll be on shortly.

A

He keeps up to speed on the power platform he's kind of my main proxy, even though I do work at Microsoft, it's a huge company and it's hard to keep up on everything. We're doing so. I actually find out a lot about a lot of things from him. So supposedly power. Virtual agents now supports adaptive cards, which I know comes up all the time and I and I basically nudged the the one person I talked to you there and that's really cool.

A

If that's true, what I wasn't clear on and the tweet that he shared was if it's available or if they've announced it's part of their plan for their next update, so it's either one of those it may be available literally right and we can kind of confirm that Tim. Maybe if you see him join you.

B

A

Can confirm that or if anyone else happens to know, but this is a really powerful platform for for for building virtual agents and and and support like scenarios and now adaptive cards. Support is either there or at least part of their next release, which is a big addition. As.

B

Far as I know, it's being wrong all right now, so they thought that rolling. It.

A

Out yeah, that was, that was my understanding as well. So that's really great stuff, so I'm gonna spend just a few minutes and update everybody on adaptive cards 1.3. So that's our next point release. That's adding a handful of nice features for really around inputs so, and you can play with it yourself. I will show it right here. So what you're seeing I've loaded up? This is a custom build of adaptive cards that IO.

A

That has this new feature so, like I said, anyone can start playing with it and you is just change your target version to 1.3. That's our upcoming release will be available, maybe by the end of this month. Possibly early, August and Ria's can add a lot of great features around inputs. So let me give you an idea what that is so previously to build a card that had some inputs. You would typically do something like this.

A

You would drag in a text block and say first name, and then you would drag in the input and then maybe drag in a text block that was last name and then dragging another input and you'd set the placeholder and really you had this text block input, text block input, and that was what we had there were, which is fine, but there are a handful of problems with that, namely a big one is accessibility and screen reader support.

A

So because there's no association between this text block and this input- you know sighted users can visually see that yeah. Okay, this one follows this: one, that's fine, but a screen reader software doesn't necessarily know that. So when a screen reader is helping, someone fill in this input.

A

They see is something like placeholder text and they lose that association with with the two. So that's a big bummer, specifically around just making making it out of cards, really accessible. It's also more verbose, it's more tedious to drag in these text blocks. You know style them the right way and the final thing is up. Until now, we've never been able to mark an input as required, and now we can simply by adding this required checkbox. So what I'm gonna do is scratch this we're gonna build a card from scratch or really I.

A

Guess I could just show you how easy it is to do this in the new 1.3 way. That's gonna give you a whole bunch of advantages which are a more succinct card.

A

So, if I delete these text blocks, what you'll see on all of our input types now is a label property, including choice, set number all input types have labels, so I can just say: label this first name and I will label this last name and that star just that red star that red asterisk just appeared there automatically I didn't have to put that in you'll notice. So it's filled in because I've marked this input as required. So a whole bunch of nice. Things just happened, the the it's just simpler. It's just a lot.

A

Simpler I've got an input. It's got a label everything's nice and compact. That means I get free accessibility support. My card is now much more accessible for people using assistive technologies like screen. Readers and I've got this free Asterix support in there that automatically gets added when I've marked this input as required.

A

So if I toggle into preview mode now, I can drag in a button really quickly and this will be called submit and if I click on preview mode, that lets you kind of interact with your card rather than design it and I can say, match and I try and submit this, and- and there is a bug here- I have to give my all inputs need an ID and sometimes I forget to do that. Now that I've, given an idea, it will behave properly and it's turning red.

A

Focusing that input and saying that yeah you know I have to fill something in here. So it's preventing me from submitting this button. I can go a step further and add a user-friendly error message in here too so I can say you know, please enter your last name and now, when I don't enter something I get a friendly error message there. So a lot of advanced stuff I just want to do a quick lap around this. You can do, for example, regular expression pattern-matching for for text inputs with numbers.

A

We now take advantage of the min and Max so if you say, enter a number between 0 and 5 and I come in here and enter 50 you'll see it'll fail validation as long as I. Let go or something like that and give it a label like age. You can see how much easier it is to build forms now, just by clicking on an input adding these labels setting these min max marking it as required and now it'll take in that min Max value as as appropriate.

A

So, if I hit 50 there, you can see now there's just basic validation, and this is gonna work across all of our SDKs Android iOS JavaScript dotnet, all of them. So it's a pretty pretty great evolution for those of you who are creating inputs and things. So that was a lap around that I was gonna. Show you quickly also how you know easy.

A

It is to convert this card into the new format, but hopefully you get it, and hopefully you want to try it yourself and can give us feedback on this, but I don't want to take away time from what Tim has to show so expect next month, I'm really hoping by next community call that we'll be able to roll this out to adaptive cards. Io and you'll be able to build cards in the designer and then from there we have to get it.

A

The SDKs will be available and then it'll take a little bit of time to get them into teams and and some of the apps that that you expect this in so even though the feature will be available on adaptive cards, it will take a little bit of time for them to roll it into the various the various platforms. So that's a lap around input, validation and 1.3. Please stay tuned. We've got a lot of cool stuff to share with that in the future.

A

So with that Tim I, don't know, I don't know if I need to switch back to the slide. Do you want me to just kind of hand it off to you at this point, yeah.

B

You can we don't really have any slides for that at all, so, except for the same part. For the first part, we don't have any slides. So that's totally fine Thomas just joined by the way and said adaptive. Cars in probably are supposed to be arriving in October, okay,.

A

On the roadmap, okay, good I'm glad on the right a photo by yes without a.

B

A

So while Tim is taking over sharing, that's by the way hasn't loaded up yet to him, you.

B

Know this is your.

A

First call just as a reminder: please keep the questions coming, we'll we'll go through them during breaks if you'd like to. We will do a dedicated Q&A at the end, but obviously filament in the chat stream, as as you feel, the need, and if you'd like to speak or clarify just do the hand raising thing and we'll try and take a pause I like to keep these. You know pretty casual, pretty informal and just you know, give you access to to myself and some of those of us on the team.

A

So whatever you'd like to ask about or talk about, please feel free.

B

Yeah, my name is Tim camera, as met already explained at the beginning. Some of you might know me, I, don't know so. I I had a look at especially the tooling currently available for adaptive cards, I'm, not sharing anything yet so we have the adaptive Kratts designer on the website, which is pretty much a drag and drop user.

B

I know which works fine, especially for yeah, let's say non-code people, so people who actually just want to design a car and yeah people like really designers who who make cars and all that I for myself laughs to build cars in jay-z, because I'm, a developer and I'm actually a lot faster building a car in jaden, then using some drag-and-drop designer. So I had a look at the existing tooling around tap and yeah.

B

There was literally nothing so we have a few extensions in Visual Studio code today, but with the extensions we have in the marketplace, that was pretty much just yeah to do an adaptive car in Visual Studio code. It was never really meant to be in edit edit or it's it's actually named adaptive cars. You are so it was. Never meant to be a full editing experience and we actually decided to take that a step further and really get some nice adaptive card. Editing experience into Visual Studio code and yeah.

A

Here we are, and can you do one just ctrl + in there just to make it just a tiny bit bigger? Okay, okay,.

B

I have the extension inside in my throat I'm just yeah the workspace I'm currently working on this um something that's coming sooner or later, it's something for the bot framework for especially for adaptive cards. Nothing to talk about yet, but that's what I currently have opened and I know that somewhere here, I have quite a few adaptive card in there and yeah I. Don't really want to search for them, but I know I want to edit them.

B

So what we did with the extension is we have that new shiny adaptive card button here when you click on it, it shows you and it shows you all cards you have in your workspace. So it's can see your current neo workspace for all eruptive cards and yeah. It just listen in the preview. You can just open the card and you directly see the car, Brainerd and yeah. You don't have to search for cards in your workspace. You can just go here and to edit the cards.

B

You want it's as simple as in the designer, so it's it's working like you would be correct. If you change things and the card, this change, you can also the card pretty easily.

B

What we also edit is what the old extension didn't support is yeah templating, as you can see, the this is just a card template we're using all the fancy placeholders everywhere and to even make that easier for you, you can always expand the cards, and then you can say I actually want to edit the template or I can I actually want to edit the data. That's a sample data for the template to make it easier to edit it.

B

In this case, we want to add a message. For example: that's what we have here and we can. We can add sample data as we want to make it easier to edit. Across another thing we we had. It was um yeah some Jayden snippets to make it even more easy to edit card. So whenever you want to add something, you can just open this new head to head a new text box, for example, and- and then you text that maybe so we can this way.

A

You next one did it put the cursor right in the text, so you could just start typing that.

B

A

Neat, that's a cool snippet, so.

B

Yeah this way you can actually easily, even if it stays and you can easily easily also code author cards. Just in vs code, you can add sample data for your cards and yeah. You see everything. Everything is right away.

B

Another thing we added is that yes, some people build cards for my close teams and other people build card for maybe katana or Windows time, a timeline or whatever, and in the current designer we have all the host convicts and you can just take pick one, the one you need. We have the same in the extension when you go to the extension settings.

B

Now you can go to the end of the cut one and just pick a different whole country, but if we just pick Microsoft implied take another card, then you can see it changed the host context right away. Maybe if you prefer that you can change that up, you can change that too, to whatever you like. Really at this point you cannot add custom holes convicts, but we definitely want to add that.

B

So we add that cards in your in your workplace, you can edit them and all that. Another thing is what you can see here, that is card stored in the CMS, so that's connected to met own CMS instance. As you know, that was we've been talking about that a lot in the last three or so community code.

B

I think we have that adaptive cards CMS, which is sort of available, but you can only host it on your own either instance right now, but you can yeah store cards online and edit them and share them and reuse them from any way. You like, really from the CMS and visual studio code, also lets you edit cards directly from the CMS right now you can open open any card. All the all. These cards are not stored in my workspace, that's coming from a database, so that's all stored in my CMS.

B

As you can see, the formatting is a bit off. So it's it's a bit rough right now, but yeah. That's still something we need to work on, but that all cards I have nowhere in my works. Wait! That's all coming from from my CMS and yeah. You can edit them here as well, and when you save them, it saves it cuts back to the CMS, and you can even see you know all the green ones are cards currently life and published in the CMS.

B

All the yellow ones are draft cards which are not published yet in the CMS.

B

Did you forget them yeah? That was that pretty much what we did for youth code? It was pretty fast now, I think Oh.

A

B

A

So yeah, so so, basically, what you're saying is when I, the first one the workspace cards you opened up. The extension is basically scanning your open project, it's scanning a file system for things that look like adaptive cards and it's just render and it's pulling out the template and allowing you to very easily edit the template and the data and preview the card. At the same time, yeah.

B

Exactly that, so, when you, when you I, can actually show you that just change that back. That's quite annoying me sorry! So when you let's say we open open our workspace. Let's take this one. For example, when you go here, you see it takes takes a little bit and it goes through all the files I have in my workspace and then return to all the cards, so it pretty much scans through all JSON files.

B

I have, in my workspace, validates the cart at the JSON files if it actually ended up with card and if it's an element got it, it's set to the tree view and even with the with the data, so we you usually only as a template, thought you don't have all you don't have the data store as well. So the moment you click on data, it creates a new file with the same name just with dot data or Drazen.

B

So when you add sample data, you can even yeah committed into github for other people or whatever cool so.

A

What is the status of this? Is it? Will it be available, sure I know yeah I know you know I'm trying to figure how we can publish it under like the Microsoft account, but or are you feeling like so it codes available on github? If you have yes, when could people start trying this out? Well.

B

This, if we I would I would say well, it's technically available right now, so you can go together if you can check out the source code and just run it locally. So it's it in the official adaptive cards repository, there's solar source tools, vs code, there's the whole source code for the for the extension. So anyone who wants to do it that way can freely just do it. I guess we have it published, as maybe as a beta version in the store by the weekend, I guess, because it's really just minor things to do so.

B

It's in a pretty pretty good state, there's some some edges here where we have to fix something, but it's in a pretty good state right now and it will be available pretty soon yet cool.

A

Okay, awesome and the CMS I know he quickly kind of went through that there's a lot to cover there, where we're still it's still in a really really preview. So if you aren't familiar with with what we're calling the adaptive card CMS or sometimes we call it card author services, it's a set of services, I think.

B

Maybe quickly showed that and something of yeah.

A

You totally can just it's I had more of an update. We are still working on it like to mention it's in an early preview. Still the plan. Is you labeled again host these services yourself? So it's a it's. You will host this as either a docker container or something else. So then your it will be available to your company you'll be able to log in and what it helps you do is quickly design and share cards within your organization, so I can hit.

A

Save and I can give this card a name and maybe a tag or whatever, and it's a web-based tool for managing all your cards and I can publish this card, which then makes it available to consume from and from a back-end app. If your. So, this is really the design time experience in a web editor and then Tim. If you want to show, if you'd have to actually share again what I believe you're showing is that your vs code is, can connect to that same CMS endpoint. The CMS is.

A

If we took the term from content management system, we kind of called it like a card management system, but it's really just a way to store your cards in a consistent way with a consistent set of REST API. Is that let you fetch cards, create them, update them and Tim? You use those api's to have vs code connect to it, I believe right. Yes, so.

B

This is actually the same card you had in your you show up there and here's. Actually, the colligan.

A

A test card yeah.

B

It's loading the cards directly from the CMS. You can edit the cards and McCarter getting towed back. So the idea is that the CMS sort of acts as the middle point, where you have just your cards, thought so I guess, eventually you might be able to go to to power automate and say: hey I want to use a card from my CMS and here envious code. Yeah.

B

These cards are actually published right now, but we might also add functionality here. So you can right. Click, publish this card or share the card here. Is that as a designer you sort of work in the in the web world? So you use your fancy. Drag-And-Drop things to design cards and developers can just yeah, go the Jason route and edit cards directly in Jason and publish them as well. Yeah.

A

That's a good way to think of it too, with the CMS kind of be in that central hub and absolutely it is our plan that you'll be able to pull from those just this list that you see the cards they're in vs code you'll be able to get that same list from power automate and really access your different card types and and then use them in your in your flows. However, you see fit so we don't have any updates on when that'll be available, but we are still working on it.

A

I'm really hoping, maybe by next month, but more like towards fall, we'll have it in a in a ready to preview state but again, you'll be kind of hosting yourself for further, at least for this first first release, yeah.

B

A

That was a look at what I guess: we're we're I, actually kind of like the name card studio, so that'll really help you manage your workspace cards and your eventually CMS cards. Now you said. Maybe this will be available this weekend. Even that I feel like as little optimistic, but maybe next week it'll be available.

A

B

Well, the the the youth code extension is that will be available next week. Definitely yeah, we probably disabled to CMS part, because no one, no one's gonna, use it without the CMS break, but editing workspace cards will be available next week. Yeah cool.

A

B

A

Another demo queued up. You want to walk us through that I had.

B

A little demo queued up yeah, so the other thing I was talking about to talk about, is um well I'm, always trying to push adaptive cart as a technology, always a little bit further. So when I was working for team work, I was actually using adaptive card in, for example, electron had to be built or I was doing just more with the rapid cards than just using them for the for the usual Microsoft teams at for example.

B

So when you ask someone hey what is adaptive cards today, I would say that a lot of people probably say: oh yeah, that's the way you build Microsoft in sports and some people might say: hey yeah, that's something you can use in power automate.

B

While that is absolutely true, so adaptive card as a technology is built by Microsoft and obviously also to be used in Microsoft products. It's a lot more, so you're free to use. But anyway you like it's the technologies open source they're the whole retina is open source. You can just go to get up download it. There's even there's NPM packages. You can start using it in your own apps. That's no problem and order to do that. It works in any HTML, CSS environment. That's a lot of pre-made SDKs and all that available.

B

There's companies who already support cards, which is like cisco francisco what exceeds, for example, and also teamwork with quite a few think they do. They also support cuts.

B

So if we share my screen again so if we look at that, for example, again so the views to be a filter to hold you here on the on the right side, envious code- that's nothing special for for Microsoft in a way that is just pretty much an iframe, so the card the card we render here is pretty much just a small mini website with a card being rendered.

B

That means you can pretty much ran our adapter card anywhere. You like in this example. What I want to show you is. Some people might might have seen that before. But I was talking about that briefly in a blog post, so I build a really small. Let's call it demo app pretty much to show what you could in theory, do with a data card.

B

It's pretty pretty small. We only have two views: I show you that in running in a minute, but we only have two views. As you can see this pretty much. No sauce, no code, there's no input test yeah. We don't have any UI irrelevant UI elements outside of of positioning things, so there's really nothing nothing here and if we run this app and start that takes a second.

B

So we have that it's nothing special, it's just just an app showing showing a few example. People you can la user. You can add a new user. You can edit users.

B

The key here is that everything you see here, except the tube or us and positioning and the navigation is actually in a rather an adaptive car. So all every every person here is well that here this is one adaptive car, if you edit a user. The whole input field here is again an adaptive car and when you click on edit, that again is just another pickup and the interesting part here that is that it's actually in total adaptive cars I had to mate to get that get that done.

B

If we go back to back to vias code, here's actually the two. The two cards that make this make the whole app. That's believe that that's a person card yeah here we have the card to edit and create a person, because adaptive cards have that that play solar and you can.

B

You can set a value as long as the value is now the placeholder is shown, and that allows us to use the card for edit and create because when you create something the video is just now and the placeholder is shown when you edit something yeah. The actual data is shown, and this way we can actually build apps and we can easily change change to the UI around like for about. Well I actually want to want to add a new field.

B

Here we want to no idea, and then we have to sample it actually available here yeah, for example, all the people ought always have preferred language. We also want to show the preferred language of the person. If we go here.

B

Yeah, maybe we should be safe, that it.

A

Was in there, it was under the this. Is my job and showed en us. Under there. Oh yeah.

B

Yeah so yeah. This is it this way, if you build, if you build apps using adaptive card for for the UI, you can do a lot of things. You don't have to change.

B

The UI like you, don't have to build any fancy CSS stuff, because adaptive card, especially with the host country, editing just blend nicely into any any UI, and you can build a whole app by just using it up to code for all the input fields and for pretty much your whole UI, especially with all the features coming in in 1.3, with the input validation.

B

I can even yea at input validation to the creation form, so it actually makes it pretty easy to build full apps just using a Turkish table. They eat more interesting parties. Now in that, in that case, I have my card obviously stored in my with my source code, but the cards here, for example, could easily come from a database or from an API call or from yeah wherever you like. Really it's just Jason and in especially JavaScript frameworks, you can know Jason from any way you want to, and that means we could.

B

For example, take that whole UI store it in a database and allow a user to edit yeah. Any user can edit the UI at the way he wants to, and even any any user can have his own UI. So, even if you want to build customizable, yeah layouts for whatever you want, then adaptive crowd might actually be get really helpful. Here.

B

We have another really really small example is, and that's the same here so we have that that website made with Castle IO, which just has a couple of sample cards for so we have a lot of car samples you can freely use again. This is just a normal website and we render it up across here. So you can do that. This is not made by Microsoft made by me. It's just just a sample page and yeah.

B

We also list a couple of tools or replicas, but again it's only an HTML, an HTML page written with UJS, and you can render cut as you want here. So the line and everything is yes adapted cards are made for Microsoft, especially, but you can use them anywhere. You like in all your apps, whatever just try, think it's all available all the NPM packages, so you can pretty much just try it try whatever you want and just build something with it.

A

Awesome, and so is that stuff also was that repo you had open there with just showing how the view j/s integration and stuff is that available as well.

B

B

A

Tim for sharing all that what I'd like to do now is just provide a link to a couple resources. We'll have a couple, others I don't know. Hopefully we put the link to the going back, see if we see it. Okay, perfect, yes, there's a way to play with input validation at the link up there. So a bunch of links to get started. One call-out I saw in the chat completely forgot to mention, while I was demoing input validation.

A

Earlier this week we did release adaptive card templating 1.0, so it's out of preview. You can use it in production. You can expect full support. You can expect updates to it it's available for.net and java script, and if you haven't used templating and you're using adaptive cards, you should be looking at templating. It will save you a ton of time to write these cards, fill them with data. You will have to either have a some kind of dotnet back-end or a node.js back-end the cards.

A

The templates basically have to be applied and data bound before they arrive into a client. I saw.

B

A

The chat there were questions on, you know when will templating be available in teams, and the hope is that down the road you'll be able to send just the template. The data could be in teams, it could be in your repo and and the data binding will happen directly on the client. That is part of our longer-term vision.

A

We will have more to share on that in the next year, but for now you can at least take advantage of templates and process them server-side before they arrive on teams and actually use them today, in teams and outlook, and things like that, Tim did you want to add something there yeah.

B

I can't stress enough pretty much that you, you actually really should consider templating so I'm, quite often I'm yeah, just looking at it up with cards things on Stack Overflow and you see quite often people who build really complex adaptive cards in tea shop as objects and then have questions, because some of the newer features are not working and right.

B

All the things we are working on with adaptive, expressions and templating is such an input, validation and all that that's not gonna work with C sharp objects, so you have to use templating pretty much to get that working properly. So, if you're still building adaptive cards in code as objects, you're pretty much missing out on a lot of new features.

A

Yeah and like you know, templating is an optional thing, so use what's working for you for sure it try, try it out. You know if you were waiting for it to leave preview. Now. Is your perfect chance to get started? You know, like I, said we shipped a couple days ago, so definitely check out templating, there's tons of samples on adaptive cards that I. Oh, we did have a build twenty20 session, the hall virtual conference back in May that'll get you up to speed.

A

If this is one of your first calls, Tim showed made with cards that I. Oh, that's, our Community Supported website showing samples and things that Tim is the main driver of that at this point, but I think the long term aspiration is that's our kind of community hub for all things. Adaptive cards so check out all these resources there's also a handful of Microsoft 365 developer community calls. So this is the adaptive cards one. Thank you for joining.

A

There's the graph there's a team's one, SharePoint power apps check out those other calls and with that I'll just kind of turn it over to QA and if anyone, if there's anything in the chat, I missed I'll, try and scroll through it's hard to scroll back on the chat and then monitor any current questions.

A

So you know we have a relatively you know small group in here today, so you can either raise your hand if you'd, like Don, mute or just you know, if there's a law, feel free to just unmute but I'll scroll through the chat and if we missed your question, please feel free, just paste it again because I'll scroll back and see but yeah. If you have any questions on anything adaptive cards, what you should saw today or just anything in general, please feel free vardaman.

A

Could you want to go ahead and ask a question yeah, so.

B

I think I might may might have missed something you said so: adapter cuts, templating 1.0.

A

Can can we.

B

Use that in teams right now I think I think I missed it.

A

What you said there, the templating, yeah yeah, so templating does work in teams as long as you apply the template or what we call sometimes expand as a template before it arrives. Two teams yeah.

B

Okay yeah, so as long as you generate the adaptive cottage cheese and then send it to teams, it would work.

A

Right, yes, templates and stuff, okay and.

B

That's that's out of preview that.

A

Approach, basically, yes, okay, okay, exactly and we announced a whole bunch of things, so we've been talking about templating for a year now and if you follow through on the chat there's this new topic, Tim mentioned it we're calling it adaptive expressions and it's a standard JSON based expression, library very similar, if not identical a superset of what you see in things like power, automate that were we're going to over time, allow some really powerful expressions to exist in the templates themselves, and these are things like you know.

A

The stock example is one I I always like to go to. Let me actually just see if I can share that really quickly, so folks get an idea of what the heck an expression is. So if you go to adaptive cards at I/o on this one, but you could go to adaptive cards that I all click on samples and go to the stock update, it's a pretty complex card. To be honest, you know we basically check. We write these expressions here and there's these there are these declarative expressions that can do things like conditionals.

A

They can do formatting, so you want to maybe round this number with two decimal places, a handful of just functions that that you would expect a template to do based on the data and so we're calling that layer that expression, layer, adaptive expressions and what what the magic that happens on all these expressions and the the value that we're providing is that you can write this expression once in your adaptive card payload, and we will be able to evaluate that expression natively on any platform, including Python, Java, dotnet JavaScript, so we're basically writing and maintaining expression evaluators.

A

On every platform that adaptive card supports so long term, you will be able to just send a template to teams just somewhere and have the data may be provided separately, where that evaluation happens directly on the client and that opens up a whole bunch of possibilities for more interactivity in the cards and things like cascading dropdowns things like just a little bit more expressiveness in the cards, so the the lead work that needs to happen is we feel good about our expression, language at the JSON layer.

A

What we're working on now is those expression, valuators, validators or engines. If you will on those other platforms, okay, great sure check it out. Thanks, so david said there appear to be some limits on the number of controls on the card, or at least some types of controls. Is there any where to find those limits?

A

So there are not any official limits on on adaptive cards what you may be hitting if you're sending cards into teams teams has a 25 kilobyte limit on the entire payload the activity payload, so you may be hitting size limits at that layer. I've heard talks of them, like so I'm on the adaptive cards team, not the team's team, I, don't know if anyone from teams is on here or if they are feel free to fill in.

A

We've talked about I know where they've talked about potentially raising that limit, I, don't think anything's been announced or they've committed anything, but you may be hitting that if you're not hitting it in teams and you're hitting it elsewhere, you may have found a bug, especially if you're putting in thousands of things we never really tested. Really, the upper bounds of you know a thousand input controls, but there's really no limit at the adaptive cards layer. You may be hitting it at an app layer like teams or all look and feel.

A

If that didn't answer, your question feel free to just add more, but I have to imagine your you might be hitting that 25k limit. That.

B

25K limit is actually something which is quite common, I think power-ups, that's the same. You get to that 25k limit quite often, but then again you have quite a large car if you get there. So that is quite a lot for cheating, so you can put a lot of things into 25k, so mm-hmm.

A

At this point, too, I'll also just put out there tomash I was gonna, send you an email but I, really there's no special treatments and adaptive cards. So if anyone feels like Tim, thank you so much for presenting this I like to engage with our community I. Think that's the point of these community calls. So if anyone has something they'd want to share similar to what Tim just did we like to keep it? You know, like I, said pretty casual. It's pretty low stress, Tomas, I, you've been blogging a lot.

A

You've been tweeting a lot making YouTube videos on stuff that I don't even really understand, I think the r-va, whatever. Why I've ever heard of that before. So, if you'd like to present something on next month's call or a future call, please anyone should feel free to reach out to me. You can find me at Matt dot, heidegger at microsoft.com and yeah. If you have anything you'd like to share on adaptive cards, let me know and we'll see what we can do about getting folks.

A

You know sharing what they're working on all right, so I will rock you. Then. Okay, perfect.

B

B

Actually have one one question, because that came up a couple of times on Stack Overflow, and maybe it's interesting for some people here. So when you work with cards for like Microsoft teams or when you, especially when you work from home cards in what framework you have that that card syntax for templating, as you have it in the designer, but especially in flows, how automate seems to have its own syntax at least partially? Are there any plans to ever consolidate that, or will that always be like? It is right now the the.

A

Definite hope is that they play nicely together, I, and that includes a handful of other places. I don't have anything to announce, but we that is definitely the plan that these languages converge. I know our expression layer is, is a superset of it, but there's slightly different tokens to activate into expression mode.

A

So I think it is a little clumsy right now, but the long-term hope for sure is that and I can't guess: I can't really share some other things, but there's other places where adaptive cards will integrate with a platform similar to power, automate that has a expression layer and we're doing what we can to make sure they adapt or or play nicely together, because I do understand that it is a bit of a you kind of have to know some tricks at this point and are you in the template layer?

A

Are you in power, automates, layer or and- and we have a little bit work to do, but it's definitely the long-term aspiration that these feel very natural? Yes, oh I, don't see any other questions, we can probably call it. We got what nine minutes left thanks. Everyone for joining Tim. Thank you again for sharing we'll see you again.

A

What is it August, 13th I think is the next call August 13th at 9 a.m. thanks so much everyone for joining and we will catch you next time.