Starting Alexa Skill in a specific state

Earlier I ran into the issue of Alexa not changing the state back to the blank state, and found out that there is a bug in doing that. To avoid this issue altogether, I decided that I wanted to force my skill to always begin with START_MODE.

I used this as my reference, where they set the state of the skill by doing alexa.state = constants.states.START before alexa.execute() at Line 55. However, when I do the same in my code, it does not work.

Below is what my skill currently looks like:

exports.newSessionHandler = {

    LaunchRequest () {
        this.hander.state = states.START;
        // Do something
    }

};

exports.stateHandler = Alexa.CreateStateHandler(states.START, {

    LaunchRequest () {
        this.emit("LaunchRequest");
    },

    IntentA () {
        // Do something
    },

    Unhandled () {
        // Do something
    }

});

I'm using Bespoken-tools to test this skill with Mocha, and when I directly feed IntentA like so:

alexa.intended("IntentA", function (err, p)  { /*...*/ })

The test complains, Error: No 'Unhandled' function defined for event: Unhandled. From what I gather, this can only mean that the skill, at launch, is at blank state (because I have not defined any Unhandled for that state), which must mean that alexa.state isn't really a thing. But then that makes me wonder how they made it work in the example code above.

I guess a workaround for this would be to create an alias for EVERY intent that I expect to have in the START_MODE, by doing:

IntentA () {
    this.handler.state = states.START;
    this.emitWithState("IntentA");
}

But I want to know if there is a way to force my skill to start in a specific state because that looks like a much, much better solution in my eyes.

via spicypumpkin