Dustin Coates in Alexa

Saving State to DynamoDB Before Each Response

Deep inside the Alexa Skills Kit Node.js SDK—not mentioned in the README or at all on the Amazon website—is a property that could significantly change how your skill behaves: saveBeforeResponse. As I pointed out in the line-by-line explanation of the SDK, this does exactly what it’s named as, but you might not know it was there. You might want this behavior when each intent is likely to cause a state change and you don’t want to force a save yourself (you can do this by emitting :saveState with a second argument of true to force a save).

This only works if you also have dynamoDBTableName set as well, but if you do and saveBeforeResponse is set to true, then the session will be saved to DynamoDB right before the response is sent.

Short post, but hopefully helps a few of you out.