Slack Workflow API Call to get Data - slack

I want to create a Slack Workflow that is triggered via an Emoji. As part of the Workflow, I need to make an API call to get some data as one of the steps. Specifically, I am looking for a Workflow where you can react with a help emoji on a question, the workflow would find out who is oncall, and then ping that person to help with the request.
Is this possible?

Related

How to trigger an existing Slack Workflow from a Slack Bot

I've built myself a slackbot which listens to emojis posted on a message.
I would like to be able to trigger a slack workflow (which I had build using the Saclk workflow builder) whenever a user tags a message using an emoji but I can't find any information on how I can do that.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Slack slash command: Respond as user, not app

When sending the response to a Slack slash command, I would like to send it under the user that has launched the slach command.
I have created a Slack app with a slash command. It calls my Flask webservice and I use the "response_url" webhook to write something back to the channel. The response in the channel is given by my app. This works as expected. But I would like for the response to be displayed as if a user has given it.
An example would be the Slack plugin from giphy. If I call it, I get an ephemeral message to choose the gif I would like. But then it is posted in the channel under my name.
So I have 2 questions:
How does the API call look like to respond to the slash command as a specific user?
What permissions for my app are required to allow for such behaviour of the app?
The Slack API documentation is comprehensive, but much research didn't yield the result I wanted.
Thanks!
When you are using response_url, you can't customize your username or icon. For this, you'll need to use chat.postMessage API method. There are now two ways to achieve what you need here:
Use user token: This gives you access to take actions on the behalf of the user. Although, you'll need to take authorization from every user you want post the message as.
Request chat:write.customize scope with your bot token: You can post a message with icon_url and username parameters where you can provide the user's icon and name respectively for both the parameters. This is much easier, as this only requires one-time authorization.
More information in the official documentation.

How to make Slack app send a private message via an incoming webhook to someone specific?

I created a Slack app that sends a series of interactive messages to a channel. In my Slack API dashboard, I see that I can create and remove hooks. Right now the hook url that I have set up in my code is the one for the Slackbot channel.
But the problem is that such a message only gets sent to me.
I want to send the Slackbot messages to Alice in situation A, and to Bob in situation B. Not just to myself, the guy who configured the app.
What's the best way to do this?
I would suggest that you should not use hooks for this. A more sane way to do this right would be via chat.postMessage Web API method which is documented here!
This is because hooks are tied to specific conversations and that approach quickly hits a wall on what it can really achieve, especially messaging different people. Once you start using the web API it's pretty simple. Just ask for the scope during app installation (remember to add that scope in your dashboard), subscribe to the event in your API dashboard and then you are good to go.
Everytime you send a message via that method, Slack will send you a payload which you can use for testing and logging etc.
You can see all the different ways to message programmatically inside Slack here.

Creating a Slackbot that adds

Hey in my team's slack (messaging system for those who don't know) we have an automatic response, so that when anyone says "trump", slackbot automatically responds with "the wall just got ten feet higher". Now I want to make a counter that essentially allows slackbot to state "the wall just got ten feet higher, wall height:(have a updated value according to number of times "trump" has been stated)" So basically I want a way to have a value that updates the wall height but I am lost on how to do that within slackbot. Any help is much appreciated, thanks to all!
The default features provided by Slackbot only allows it to respond to keywords, but not much more. So to provide that additional feature you would need to develop a custom bot.
For your use case I would recommend building a so called internal integration for Slack using the Events API.
Internal integration allows you to add custom functions for your Slack team only (as opposed to a full fledged Slack app, that could also be installed and used for other Slack teams).
The Events API allows you to set up a bot that listens to messages and can react to keywords like "trump".
An alternative approach to the events API would be the outgoing webhook. However this function is now deprecated and should no longer be used. Also it only works with public channels.
To set this up you will need to develop a small webservice (e.g. in PHP) that listens on a webserver for requests from the events API, keeps count of how many times the keyword has been invoked in the past and sends an appropriate message back to your Slack team every time the keyword is used.
I can recommend reading the excellent official Slack API documentation if you want to learn more.
If you are familiar with PHP this can be done easily using the Slackbot Framework. It supports Events API allowing you to listen to messages in channels or direct messages (depending on the permission scopes of your APP). So all the conversations on Slack can be sent to your server and you can search for the specific keyword in every message. Then send back an appropriate message to Slack. In summary, the first step is to create an APP for your slack team at https://api.slack.com/apps?new_app=1. Next step is to install the Slackbot Framework which is explained here. Hope this is helpful.
That can also be done by integrating custom slack bot using Django. You'll have to subscribe events and based on events, Slack will send conversation message to the given url, and based on the event, you can write your logic to increase count and post message back to slack work space.

Need suggestions in getting the conversation details

I am creating a bot using MS Bot framework - NodeJs. The below information needs to be captured for logging (Using the bot.use method i.e. IMiddleware).
Receive:
a. UserId
b. UserInput (text)
c. ConversationId
Send:
1. Name of Intent or dialog name that handled this (that handled the user input text)
2. Bot output text
3. ConversationId
4. UserId
I am unable to get the required detail for the 'send'. Can anyone provide me some suggestions on this.
Thanks.
I believe your main struggle is to log the name of intent or dialog. You won't know it in your send middleware if you haven't captured it during the routing phase. Once the Bot Framework figured out where to send the incoming message, it just invokes that function.
These two articles may help you get what you want. Just recently I played with capturing the conversation's breadcrumbs and also logging a full transcript:
http://www.pveller.com/smarter-conversations-part-3-breadcrumbs/
http://www.pveller.com/smarter-conversations-part-4-transcript/
If you need to build a reliable capture engine, I would suggest that you didn't use the session.privateConversationData like I did and instead built your own storage/log infrastructure to push the events to. Just stream them out with a timestamp and conversationId and reconcile on the other end later. The asynchronous nature of everything the bot framework does internally will be haunting you along the way so that's why. Plus, once you scale out beyond testing on a few users and your bot spans multiple processes, you will be out of the single-threaded event loop.

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