Blackboard¶

The Blackboard is one of the central concepts of stepDP. All tokens are first written to the blackboard and from there further processed or they trigger actions. Thus, a certain token can trigger a dialogue interaction or several tokens can be fused into a new token.

There are two areas: the active tokens and the archived tokens. Only the active tokens are actively processed. The archived tokens no longer trigger any rules, but they can still be accessed. By default, tokens are archived after 5 minutes. However, this value can be changed globally and for each token itself (e.g., a token of a pointing device usually only wants to be active for a few seconds, because after that the processing no longer makes sense.). To change the value individually, use the methods setIgnoreTime to set how long to wait until the token becomes active and setDeleteTime to set how long to wait until it becomes inactive. Both take the number of Miliseconds as an argument. After the tokens have been archived, they are permanently deleted from Blackboard after a further time period of 60 minutes and can no longer be accessed.