i am working on a slack app (scope including bot and incoming webhooks). I can send message to a defined channel but i don't know how to stop using the "&channel=" parameter and just send messages to listening channels. By listening i mean, when the app is installed, user is asked where to post (channel or dm has to be chosen).
String postUrl = "https://slack.com/api/chat.postMessage?token=" + botAccessToken + "&as_user=false&channel=%23community&text=testing&username=CommunityQ";
Any hints would be useful.
I think you can't: According to the official Slack API documentation it is not possible to send messages to all/multiple listening channels:
Incoming webhooks output to a default channel and can only send
messages to a single channel at a time. You can override a custom
integration's configured channel by specifying the channel field in
your JSON payload.
I interpret this as "there is always exactly one channel your message is sent to"
Furthermore, Slack restricts this channel override feature for Slack apps:
You cannot override the default username, icon, or channel for
incoming webhooks attached to Slack apps.
I think there is a slight confusion here. I am not sure what the "incoming webhook" scope does that the "bot" scope cannot do. Here's how I see things
Either you want a lightweight, low-permission app that posts in one channel, and you'd use the incoming webhook scope
Or you want an app that can ask questions to the users, like which channels they'd like to have updated posted to, process answers, etc. Then you'd use the bot scope, and the bot can post in any public channel
If you give a bit more details in what you want to achieve we can perhaps help you better
If you want a more dynamic approach on sending messages into any channel I would suggest to user the API method chat.postMessage instead of an incoming webhook.
The API method can post messages into any channel (including private channels, DMs) as long as your token as access to it.
As Michael mentioned in his answer, it is not possible to post to multiple channels at the same time. You have to look through them and do multiple requests.
Related
I want to send different messages to multiple users at once. I read the article here: https://www.twilio.com/blog/send-bulk-sms-twilio-node-js-html but it mentions nothing about sending customized messages. The only difference in my messages is the user's name.
The best solution I can think of is to create x number of API calls to send messages to x numbers. I believe that's going to be time taking. Is it possible to do it with one API call?
Twilio developer evangelist, and author of that post, here.
You are right, there is not currently a Twilio service that allows you to send bulk messages with customised messages with one single API call. You will have to make an API call to the messages resource for each message you want to send.
When sending messages in bulk, I recommend you read and understand this article on Twilio rate limits and message queues. That will ensure you are successful in sending your messages.
I am using the Twilio API for WhatsApp in a sandbox, for prototyping and testing. According to the Facebook / WhatsApp documentation, there are several types of inbound notifications that may be delivered to your unique Webhook.
Twilio API documentation is very limited and doesn’t mention any of the more advanced scenarios. For example retrieving the customers name, which should be present in every webhook request…
When I inspect the webhook, the body payload is very limited. Is there any way to receive the original channelData?
Apparently, this feature is not implemented yet. I received the following statement from Twilio.
Unfortunately we don't support the Contact name being included in the inbound Whatsapp message posted to your webhook at this time. I've raised a feature request for this with the Product Team in hopes that we'll have this feature available in the near future.
You can get the sender's name using the 'ProfileName' key from the request form.
I have created a slack bot and I want to send a general static help message to users when they send a direct message to my bot:
Should I subscribe to Events API? Or do I need to do this in another way? I couldn't find a clear answer for this.
There are two ways to do make your bot user reply to direct messages:
Events API
Real Time Messaging API
In my opinion the Events API approach is easier to implement since it does not require using WebSockets.
The basic approach with the Events API is:
You need an endpoint that can receive event requests from Slack and
react to it, e.g. by sending a direct message back to a user.
Subscribe to message.im event for your bot user
Note that a bot user already has all the required scopes for this with the bot scope.
In addition I would recommend to subscribe to app.mention for your bot user. Then it can also react to mentions in other channels.
Btw. that message you posted looks a lot like a review comment from the Slack team for a new app submission. I got a similar one for my last app and I solved it with the approach above. In general it looks like if you want to have a bot user in your app it needs to be able to respond to help request from users.
Hi I have been working on one of my apps for integrating chat using Twilio SDK. I would want to know if it is possible to get the system message inside a channel for eg: 'Member A joined the channel', 'Member B left the channel', 'Member C accepted the invitation to join' and so on. It seems like Twilio SDK does not have API to get the system messages or to set them. How can we achieve this?
I also noticed that it can be achieved by setting the custom key-value pair in attributes inside the message and sending it to the channel. But for the newly invited members, they cannot send a message when they are declining the invitation request such as 'Member A declined the invitation to join channel', as they have not joined the channel yet.
Twilio developer evangelist here.
If you want to send persistent system level messages like this, you can do so with a combination of webhooks and the REST API.
The idea is that you can send messages to a channel using the REST API whenever you need one of these system messages. The default user for the REST API is the system and you can then treat messages from system as special for display in your UI.
I mention the webhooks because you can register to receive them for a number of useful events, like members joining and leaving channels. The webhooks may not cover all the things you want, like declining an invite, but for that I would just trigger my own HTTP request from the application to your server.
Let me know if that helps at all.
I created a websocket-based Slack bot (that plays chess). In order to return a graphical representation of the board (so PNG instead of simple ASCII) I must use a webhook since normal messages cannot have attachments.
The interaction with the bot is through direct messages and I have 1 webhook. If I set the channel in the wehook to '#username' the message gets posted in that user 'slackbot' DM. But I want it to be posted in my bot's DM with that user.
How do I do that?
Or is there an alternative instead of a webhook?
Thanks.
Henry
Direct messages between bot and user
If you want to use a bot-specific direct message channel instead of the general slackbot channel you need to open a direct message channel just as you would between any two users.
Open the direct message channel from your bot to a user with im.open (which will provide you with the channel ID). Then send the message to that channel ID, e.g. with chat.postMessage.
Important: Make sure you use the bot access token and not the general access token for all API calls.
Method for sending messages
I would recommend using the API method chat.postMessage instead of the webhook. It gives you more options than a webhook and of course also supports attachments.