I'm looking to open a dialog in Slack based on the user executing a basic slash command. I can currently capture the payload from a slash command in my API, and action this accordingly, but my understanding is that in order to open a dialog I need a corresponding trigger_id, which doesn't seem to be present in the payload.
The only values I have are: token, channel_name, user_name, command and text.
I might be misunderstanding this, but everything I have read seems to suggest that I should have said trigger_id as part of my incoming payload. Is this correct?
I do have Interactivity turned on within my app, but can't see anything in there to link this to a slash command. Is that a correct assumption that they are separate? Or are they linked in some way?
Can anybody help with this?
This wasn't a slack issue, but a C#/serialisation issue my side. The trigger_id was being received within the payload, but not serialised properly on the server (even though a JsonProperty was defined), as the object was specified as TriggerId on the object itself. For anyone having this problem in C#, just ensure the trigger ID column is defined as trigger_id
Related
Summary
I am using the Bot Framework REST API to create and update Microsoft Teams posts.
I have found that I can only update the last two posts of a conversation, but cannot find documentation that describes this restriction.
It is not possible to identify the failed updates from the API response, as the HTTP response code and body is always the same, regardless of whether the update works or not (200 with the id of the "updated" activity). I would expect the response to indicate the failure, and so this appears to be a Teams bug.
Detail
I can create conversations and create replies to conversations using the Bot Framework REST API without issue (using the create conversation and send to conversation endpoints). My problem arises if I try to update these messages.
Given a conversation that looks like this:
parent_message
|_ child_message_1
|_ child_message_2
|_ child_message_3
If I attempt to use the update activty endpoint to update each one of these messages, I observe that:
I can always update parent_message.
I can update child_message_3 and child_message_2, but not child_message_1. In each case the HTTP response is a successful HTTP response (200 response code, with a JSON body that contains the id of the updated message), regardless of whether the update succeeds or not.
If I add another message, child_message_4, then this will be updatable, but child_message_2 will no longer be updatable. I assume this is because now child_message_2 is no longer one of the last two messages.
I see the same behavior if another user adds messages to the conversation, ie. if a user were to make two posts to the conversation I would no longer be able to update any of my own child messages as they are no longer one of the last two messages.
My questions are:
Does anyone know if this restriction is by design? If so, can you point to some documentation on this?
Is it possible to determine when an update fails? As mentioned, the HTTP response always reports success so I'm unable to find a way to do this. Is this a bug in Teams?
Thanks for reporting this. We are able to repro this at our end and we are tracking it here: MicrosoftDocs/msteams-docs#2011
Please follow this issue for updates/progress/questions.
Updates: This is fixed.
This appears to be a bug, but I think the bug is different from what you think it is. Go ahead and "refresh" the conversation and you should see the updates in effect. If you're using the web app then you can refresh the page, but since you're probably using the desktop or mobile app then you could try switching to another conversation and back, or you might have to sign out and sign in again.
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.
I am developing a Google Actions project for Google Home using api.ai.
Is it possible to pass a state parameter as part of the response to api.ai and have it included in the next request?
The Amazon Alexa API handles such a flow and it came in handy.
Thanks
EDIT:
I did not mention this before: I have api.ai sending requests to a webhook after google assistant triggers my intents. The response api.ai expects is defined here. I've tried including extra fields in the response but these are not included in any future intent requests from api.ai. I've also tried adding fields and values to the google specific portion of the response (defined here) to no avail.
As an example of what I am interested in, when responding to Alexa requests we can include a json field "sessionAttributes" which are then passed by Amazon in any future requests that are part of that interaction.
In this instance I query a database key on the first intent (which is subsequently used to pull a record) and pass that key in sessionAttributes to avoid performing that lookup for every intent request I receive.
The equivalent that you are looking for to sessionAttributes in Alexa dev depends on whether you are using an API.ai webhook or a conversation webhook. Reference this doc for more info on the differences.
Since you are using API.ai, assuming you are using the Node.js client library, use the snippet below. 'Contexts' can store data, not just serve as a flag of sorts to establish where you are in a conversation. Call setContext just before you call 'ask' and close out your webhook fulfillment.
app.setContext('<context name>', <lifespan of context>, <JSON to store>)
Then for the next round of fulfillment, retrieve the JSON from the parameters object within the Context. Get it with:
var myContext = app.getContext('<context name>')
Reference the examples in these docs for more info.
You could create an optional parameter in API.ai to catch/store this value and append any message being sent to API.ai with a marker and then the database value you want to cache, so API.ai recognizes from the marker the value to be cached as the parameter, and this would be passed back out of API.ai as well, so if you needed to chain/loop this, on your side you again just check if it has the special 'append' parameter value to append that to the next user message.
That being said, contexts can likely achieve the same end-goal you are trying to achieve in a much more straightforward fashion
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.
Use Case SMS leaves my platform and goes out to a receiver (SMS). I would like to attach some sort of custom identifier so when the user responds back to the SMS..and my platform received the message..I know how to internally route the response back in my platform.
Any ideas?
Maybe set up a system where when the code is sent out
For instance:
Code - 11832
The user then has to enter this code on your website. A program will then match to see if it's the identical code. So you are then able to log the information
No expert on this though and Where is your code ?
Twilio evangelist here.
There isn't really a great way to attach an identifier to the message itself. You could force the user to prepend/append a code in their reply, but depending on your specific scenario that might not be a great user experience.
Another option is to save the to/from phone number as a unique pair when you send the message. Then as your application receives replies you can check the incoming to/from phone number against what you saved.
Hope that helps.