Here is our business case:

• Business wants to launch the pega self service advisor from a repeating grid.
• We need to pass a parameter from the row to Pega self service advisor and launch the advisors Q&A based on parameter.
• We are good with configuring all the Q&A workflows and we can run them standalone from the portal level invocation ( from online help icon). But we do not want to have the chat icon at the portal level. we want to have the trigger of launching from the repeating grid ( something like search results ).

we tried the below options but none of those solve our issue:

Option 1: There is a post by Amit in community.  https://collaborate.pega.com/question/initiate-pegachat-through-hyperlink

we tried to create a control to have the chat snippet. Chat gadget is  getting launched but looks like this is only for the live agents based on the chat queues we configured in the Chat Servers. How do we launch the Chatbot with the configuration to driver the Q & A ? Is it applicable at all in this scenario?

Option 2: InvokeAdvisor ()

We tried to trigger invokeAdvisor function from a button click. All the PegaHelper.js, PegaHelperExtension.js and Mashup.js are accessible. But it is giving an error “Errors:.HelpConfiguration: Unable to load data page D_OnlineHelpConfig. Required parameters : HelpConfigName. cannot be blank”. We are not able to understand the execution path and how this data page is getting populated.

Hi, thanks for posting the business use case. Option 1 post is 3 years old and does not apply to the new mashup based chat. 

So, option 2 is what you will need to do. The guidance here is based on the assumption that the steps described in this article https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/pega-customer-service/84/creating-self-service-application are completed. The Chatbot is downloaded from the Self-Service Configuration portal and deployed on a webserver. The download will contain two JS files. One is PegaHelper and other is PegaHelperExtension. When you download the package, the PegaHelper file will be populated with the correct values in the PegaChatConfig object. This is required and if removed, can result in the error you saw above. So, our advice is that you should not touch the PegaHelper.JS file. 

Now, to meet your use case: 

1) You can just hide the default launcher in CSS by adding display:none to the #launcherminimized and #launcher IDs. One thing to consider here is what happens if the user minimizes the chatbot while using it. Typically, the launcherminimized div is the one that's shown at that time and just restores the chatbot on click. So, you may not want to hide that one. 

2) To start the chatbot session, you can issue the InvokeAdvisor function. As long as the PegaChatConfig object is intact, this should work to invoke the bot. 

3) To pass in custom parameters to the bot, update the preparePegaAParams function in the PegaHelperExtension and add whatever properties you want. For example: pegaAParamObj.RowName = "Foo"; This value WILL get passed to the Chatbot automatically. There is some additional work required on the Chatbot application side to actually do something with this. See the article here https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/configuring-chat-pega-customer-service/passing-custom-data-chatbot.