In a Slack conversation, is it possible to click on a button to send a message to the Slack channel?
The Slack conversation could be:
The user types a word (or message)
A slackbot shows some text and two buttons
The user clicks on a button to send a TEXT message to the Slack channel
The Slackbot reacts on the 'action' message.
It is not possible to create an REST service for my Slackbot, because the Slackbot is behind a firewall. So, registering commands is not possible.
So sending a message as the result of a button click is needed. The Slackbot can react on that message.
I read that attachments could be a good way to do this, BUT the is 'outmoded'.
I tried to send an secondary attachment, which is outmoded, but that was not possible.
The next approach was adding a webhook. So pushing a button resulted in using the url, but that is of course not possible because I cannot send a POST request via a simple (get) url.
Please give a short example.
This will not work.
Every interactive feature (e.g. buttons) require your app to be able to receive POST requests from Slack through the public Internet. Since you say you can not provide that (e.g. behind a company firewall) you will not be able to use any interactive features.
See also this answer: How to integrate internal APIs (Not accessible outside office network) to slack slash commands
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 would like customers to be able to click a button to send themselves a transcript at any point in the conversation. This button should essentially send a message to the bot which would initiate an “email transcript" dialog to prompt for their email and send the transcript. I was able to add a button to the directline webchat client (in my title bar) but I can't figure out how to have it create an activity for the bot. I have a custom store that sends an "inactive" activity but I wasn't able to use this same method to make the button send an activity. Can this be achieved? Or is there another way for customers to get a copy of their transcript?
I have achieved the actual transcript retrieval and emailing in code, initiates by a LUIS intent, I just want to provide an intuitive "always there" option to do this.
The WebChat offers a simple sample that shows you how to send activities programmatically to the bot. In this sample they are creating a separate button with an Event Listener, which will sent your message as a message activity.
If you would like to sent it as an event in the background, you could have a look at this sample, which you could combine with the event listener of the first example.
How to send a message programmatically
How to send welcome event
Note: you need to use the JavaScript WebChat, it is not possible to add this functionality to the iFrame version of the Bot Service.
When creating a slack app, it creates a new "channel" in the left hand menu. I want to be able to send a message to specific users and not to all users in a workspace who have integrated with the app.
For example, if I make the following request:
curl -X POST -H 'Content-type: application/json' --data '{"text":"Hello, World!"}' https://hooks.slack.com/services/ABxxx/CDxxx/EFxxxxxx
It will send a message to all users who have integrated with my app with the text "Hello World".
But I only want to send a message to user A without User B being notified.
I don't want to message a user directly and it to appear to come from slack bot. I want the message to appear to come from my bot / app.
How can this be achieved via slack API?
I found this quite hard to explain so please let me know if you'd like me to clarify anything.
The problem of your request that you are using a hook URL which is bound to a particular channel (you pick it during Slack App installation).
To send a direct message to the user on behalf of your bot, you need to consider the following things (this is not the single way to achieve it, but works for me):
Ensure you have a bot registered for your Slack App.
Ask for bot and chat:write:bot permissions during App installation process (example for Slack Install button and here).
Store the bot access token on successful installation (see for details).
Now using the bot access token you can send Slack API requests.
To achieve what you need, use chat.postMessage API method. channel argument can be user ID (e.g. U0G9QF9C6). By setting up as_user argument to true, your message will be always sent on behalf (name and icon) of your bot (seems for bot tokens it's always like this, but it's recommend it to specify it explicitly).
Hope it helps. Feel free to ask for details.
Is there a way, by means of some setting or programmatically, to allow a user on Slack to confirm that the user really wants to send a message before the message is sent? Often times we end up sending messages on the wrong channels or DMs. How can we prevent these?
Assuming by "send a message" you mean "post a message" to a channel.
Via Settings
No. There is no Slack setting to enable confirmation before a message is posting.
Programmatically
No. Its possible to retrieve all messages that are posted to a channel with a Slack app (e.g. via Events API) and then react to them, but only after the fact. To the best of my knowledge it is not possible to insert some kind of confirmation logic into the standard process of posting a message.
I'm trying to have my backend create a poll for a given user and when the user responds to the poll receive the response on the backend. However I cannot find a way to do the second part with an API available.
I know I can use Incoming Webhooks to send a command to users slackbot channel: /poll .. ... ... however I'm unsure how to receive a response from when user selects one of the options in the poll.
OK, one approach would be
Slash command for the /pollcommand, it will send a request to your app every time a user enters the command
Your app can then sends the actual message containing the poll details back to the channel incl. message menus simply by responding to the slash request or with Web API e.g. chat.PostMessage
User chooses polls option from message menus. Chosen option is send back to your app by Slack.
This is just one approach. Alternatively you could also show the options as message buttons or open a Dialog for the user.
I would advise against using outgoing webhooks, since its no longer part of the main features (and slash commands and interactive menus will send a request directly to your app anyway). Also Web API / chat.PostMessage is better than Incoming webhooks.