question

Cam Collins asked Jul 6, '15

There was a problem communicating with the requested application

Hello, We are trying to debug our first skill and get the following verbal response from Alexa: "there was a problem communicating with the requested application" We verified that the target URL was in fact successfully "crawled" by the service, so there is not an issue with it being blocked. In my Echo app, it says: "Unexpected Communication Issue" MySkill Request Identifier: amz1.echo.laksdjg;lksajg;aslkgdjasd;lkgjad;glkjds; (blah blah blah) ... What I am looking for is a more specific error output. Is there a place to better understand what "problem" might mean? We don't show any errors occurring on our end. Thanks!

alexa skills kit debugging

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Cam Collins answered Jul 6, '15

We made some progress. Now it says "There was a problem with the requested application response."

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Cam Collins answered Jul 6, '15

One step forward, two back. My Echo app provided a Content Length header error. So we added a Content Length header using function strlen to get an accurate count. Now we are back to the Unexpected Communication Issue.

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Cam Collins answered Jul 6, '15

SUCCESS! We found out there was a comment causing the issue. Yes, a comment. // JSON Document This line was in the top of our code and Alexa was not pleased by it. As soon as we deleted it, it started working!

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April L. Hamilton answered Jul 7, '15

I've found Alexa throws "I'm having trouble accessing your [name] app right now" as an all-purpose error when there's an error of any kind in my code. When I hear [i]that[/i] during a test session, I go back to my script to start looking for missing brackets, braces and semicolons. Sounds like "There was a problem communicating with the requested application" may be a similarly generic error message for miscellaneous code errors.

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Greg Laabs answered Jul 7, '15

She says that when your endpoint failed to return a proper JSON object. You should structure your app such that it will ALWAYS provide an Alexa response even if an unexpected error occurs. Try wrapping your main method in a try/catch, and then you can log the unhandled exception in the case of an issue, and have Alexa give a more customized error response. Also, you'd likely avoid a lot of these issues if you developed with an editor that provided linting, or even better full on code inspection. If you're using Javascript, get JSHint setup in your editor. I personally use WebStorm for javascript development and its code inspection warnings are a godsend for catching silly issues before I end up needing to debug them. :)

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jjaquinta answered Jul 7, '15

You can always test with EchoSim. It's easier to get a coherent response from it since it doesn't have to report to the user. You can also set up regression tests which make it a lot less tedious to reproduce problems! https://github.com/jjaquinta/EchoSim

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Ross@Amazon answered Jul 13, '15

Thank you for commenting on this error and your solution. We appreciate your participation and interest in Amazon's Alexa Skills Kit developer program.

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