When someone mentions a specific username by their handle in Slack, the user typically gets notified about that mention by Slack. I would like to make a Slack app that subscribes to those notifications for the current user. Any time a user gets notified that they were directly mentioned, I'd like to be informed of that in my app, along with the contents of that message.
I've looked through the API docs for quite a while and I can't seem to find support for this functionality. Am I missing something? Can this be done?
There is no event in the Slack Event API that handles mentions of users (although if you create a slack bot you can handle mentions of the slack bot's user with the app_mention event).
You can still listen for the message event and manually look through the text for any #UserMentions and handle them there. Note that this will only work for channels that the Slackbot has been granted access to.
Related
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.
I have a bot with event scopes app_mention and messages.im. It also has OAuth scopes app_mentions.read, channels.history, chat.write, groups.history, and im.history.
If I # mention my bot in a public channel, a thread off of a public channel, or directly message my bot I get an event. But if I'm in a private message with someone else and # mention my bot, I don't get any events from the #mention.
What is the correct event scope to enable to get the event?
you can't unfortuantly. app_mention only works in conversations the bot would have access to. You would need each user to directly give you access to im history and monitor every message event for a mention of the bot itself (probably either some regex or similar to look for the <#bot_name>.
I know there was a link_names part of the json object being sent for message events but you'd still need to check the message body to make sure its your bot being mentioned and not another user
I'm using slack api to send reply whenever there is any direct message to authenticated user. So I created app, enabled events api and verified webhook url and subscribed to messages.im event
I use regular oauth flow with scope(chat:write:user,users:read) to get the access token.
First I tried with the admin of the workspace and everything worked fine. Whenever there is a direct message between admin user and any other user, i'm receiving events to my callback.
NOW
when I tried same with normal user(user2) i'm not receiving any events back when there is direct message between user2 and some other user. I followed the same steps above.
User2 went through same oauth flow with same scopes and got the access token of his own. As I subscribed to events api, I should be able to received event callbacks to the url I mentioned.
Is there any issue here? Is this not how things work?
This is not supposed to work.
Your Slack app will only receive message events from channels / conversations, which the installing user is a member of (e.g. the admin is member of the direct messaging conversation between him and others). But it's not possible to get direct messages between other users.
This is how Slack's security architecture is designed. In general it is not possible for any Slack app to monitor all private and direct messaging channel, even if the installing use is an admin / owner.
A common workaround for private channels is to retrieve messages for a bot user and make sure that bot user is a member of all private channels you need to monitor. However, this workaround is not very practical for direct message conversations.
Turns out it is an issue with scopes, following is the message I received from slack support team, they are awesome.
Hi Sasikanth,
Thanks for getting back to me. I took a look and it seems that there was some change with the scopes requested when user2 installed the "My App Name" app.
Here are the scopes that each of these users received upon installing the "My App Name":
user1: im:history,users:read,chat:write:user
user2: users:read,chat:write:user
You'll notice that user 1 above has the im:history scope, whereas user 2 above does not. It's mentioned on the doc for the message.im event type (https://api.slack.com/events/message.im) that the im:history scope is needed.
That's the reason why you're not receiving the message.im event type for DMs sent to user 2.
I hope that helps to explain the issue. What you'll need to do is remove the authorization for user2 from: (my dev app url) and have that user reinstall the app with the appropriate scopes.
Slack bots can get information about messages that have just been posted with the "messages" event. So why can't they get information about all the messages in a thread?
So for example when someone makes a reply to a message in a thread a message event is fired with the subtype of "message_replied" however the text fields of all of the messages in the result are out of scope for the bot.
Is there a way to access this information? I have tried using things like channels.replies and conversations.replies but the results of those are out of scope for the bot too. Requiring the channels:history scope.
I would settle for the bot being able to read the content of its own messages only.
You can access threads with your bot via API method conversations.replies (or the pendant methods) by using the user token from your Slack app. A Slack app with bot users always has both a user token (with rights inherited from the original installer) and a bot token.
As the documentation says in section Threading messages:
While Slack app-based bot users can't access these methods directly,
user tokens granted with the correlating scope can.
I have successfully setup my slack bot app, have enabled events etc. I want to receive any direct messages that the members of my slack team send to my bot. For this, I have only enabled Bot Events and No Team Events like below
However, I do not get any event on my webhook on this setting.
If I enable message.im event under Team Events, then I start getting events. But then, I get every message that the user (who has installed the app) sends to any other user in the team.
How do I get only the messages that are sent to my bot user?
Update 1
Based on this SO question I created a private channel with the bot user. Even then, the messages in the private channel do not arrive in my webhook with the above event subscriptions.
Update 2
After reinstalling the app, it seems to be working fine. I have only used it for few minutes after the reinstall so far. I will keep posting here how it goes. It would still be interesting to know what went wrong where.
It is normal behavior that your script receives all messages (for every channel your bot is a member of), not only the messages sent directly to your bot. At this time you can not filter further in the event configuration. So you need to filter out any unwanted message in your script handling the event.
See also this answer.