I am developing a series of Slack apps for my workspace, and some of them are meant to interact with the content (messages) delivered by the other apps : extracting content IDs that may be referred to by other messages
A concrete example :
Suppose I have an app A "FindUser" that is capable of giving me the user profile when a slack user types find me#example.com, and it replies in the thread with a formatted view of the user profile
I am developing an app B "EditTags", which basically gives me a right click option with "edit tags" (see Slack's Interactive Components/Actions), the idea being that a user could first ask app A to find a user, and then right click on the reply from App A and click the "edit tags" action given by the other app. What this app B does it actually retrieve the tags for the user mentionned by the previous message from app A, and in another reply to the thread it gives some controls to either delete an existing tag OR it shows a select with autocomplete to add new tags.
The B app needs to retrieve the user ID that the A app mentionned previously. So I need some way to pass that data directly in the slack message. When looking at the examples, slack does not seem to provide a way to add arbitrary "metadata" to a message, am I wrong ? Do you have workaround for this ? I mean I could totally send the user ID say, in the footer, so I can just read the footer, but I was planning to use the footer for something else... Is there a way to pass metadata hrough properties that would be hidden to the end user ?
Although this does not feel relevant, I am building a slack nodeJS app using the node slack sdk (and especially the #slack/interactive-messages package)
For the most part the Slack API does not provide any official means to attach custom data / meta data to messages. But with some simple "hacks" it is still possible. Here is how:
Approach
The basic approach is to use an existing field of the message as container for your data. Obviously you want to pick a field that is not directly linked to Slack functionality.
Some field are not always needed, so you can just use that field as data container. Or if its needed, you can include the functional value of that field along with your custom data in the data container.
For example for message buttons you could use the value field of a button and structure your code in a way that you do not need it in its original function. Usually its sufficient to know which button the user client (via the name field), so the value field is free to be used for your custom data. Or you can include the functional value of your button along with the custom data in a data container (e.g. a JSON string) in that field.
Serialization
All messages are transported through HTTP and mostly encoded as UTF-8 in JSON. So you want to serialize / de-serialize your data accordingly, especially if its binary data. If possible I would recommend to use JSON.
Length
The maximum allowed length of most fields is documented in the official Slack API documentation. e.g. for the value field for message buttons can contain up to 2.000 characters. Keep in mind that you need to consider the length of your data after serialization. e.g. if you convert binary data into Base64 so it can be transported with HTTP you will end up with about 1.33 characters for every byte.
Contents
In general I would recommend to keep your data container as small as possible and not include the actual data, but only IDs. Here are two common approaches:
Include IDs of your data objects and load the actual objects
from a data store when the request is later processed.
Include the ID of server session and when processing the request you
can restore the corresponding server session which contains all data
objects.
In addition you might need to include functional values so that the functionality of the field you are using still works (e.g. value of a menu option, see below)
Implementation
Dialogs
Dialogs provide an official field for custom data called state. Up to 3.000 characters.
Message buttons
For Message buttons you can use the message action fields / value. Up to 2.000 characters. Its also possible to use the name field, but I would advise against it, because the maximum allowed length of that field is not documented.
Message menus
For Message menus you can use the value field of an option or the name field of the menu action.
Usually the value field is the better approach, since you have a documented max length of 2.000 and it gives you more flexibility. However, you will need to combine you custom data with the actual functional value for each option. Also, this will not work for dynamic select elements (like users), where you can not control the value field.
When using the name field note, keep in mind that the maximum allowed length of name is not documented, so you want to keep you data as short as possible. Also, if you want to use more than one menu per attachment you need to include the actual name of the menu into your data container.
Normal message attachments
Normal message attachments do not contain any suitable field to be used as container for custom data, since all fields are linked to Slack functionality.
Technically you could use the fallback field, but only if you are 100% sure that your app is never used on a client that can not display attachments. Otherwise your data will be displayed to the user.
Related
I have an API response in which a field gives me an array of objects. I want to prompt the user to select which one of these objects in the array they want to see the details of. For example, if the API response has a field like:
"field":[
{"number":"101","name":"abc","value":"final output 1"},
{"number":"102","name":"xyz","value":"final output 2"}
]
I want the prompt/card to ask which number and name the user wants to choose, accordingly I want to show the corresponding value to the user. The number of objects in the array can vary. I would prefer if this prompt is in the form of an adaptive card like the one in the attached image, but any solution would do using bot composer's capabilities.
One viable solution would be to build a card in code. You can parse the response from the API and use it to create a card which can then be sent by the bot. Since this is Composer, you can look into creating a custom action to hold this logic.
As the user AP01 has said, one good solution to this problem is to do it inside the code. You can create a custom component that will execute C#(or nodejs if you use that) code in which you can then easily deserialize/parse/process that json array and create a custom card that will then be display to the user. That is how I did it.
Background:
I use mongodb where a typical document may contain fields with large values. A description field may hold over 200KB.
The same document also contains a title field which is limited to 64 characters (max).
I’d like to setup the code so that it's more network-efficient when the user modifies title.
Current state:
I use doc.$push() to store the changes in the document.
Spec is: https://vuex-orm.github.io/plugin-graphql/guide/push.html
In this case the browser devtools network tab shows that the whole document is being sent, including the description despite not being modified. Needless to say, that's an unreasonable overhead for such a network request.
How do I set it up so that only the title value is included and sent in the network request?
One approach is to use apollo-client with a custom mutation query updating only title. This approach ends up messing up the codebase because there are more collections and more fields which are required to update without resending the whole document. So really, I seek a generic approach.
So, any ideas as for how to execute partial mutations with vuex-orm over graphql?
I wanted to create a new option in the Data Browser (just like the "username", "password", "authData"...fields), to hold a monetary value for my game. So a new field called "money" that will hold a value.
However, I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing so.
I took a look at the documentation and found things like .add but I wasn't sure exactly what was going on in the code.
Does anyone know a way to do this?
In the data browser, there is a "+ Col" button which allows you to add another field to your class. You can then set the name of the field and it's type.
You can also do this from their SDK's by simply setting the field, even if you have not added it via the data browser.
Here is what the Parse docs say regarding this:
Storing data through the Parse REST API is built around a JSON encoding of the object's data. This data is schemaless, which means that you don't need to specify ahead of time what keys exist on each object. You simply set whatever key-value pairs you want, and the backend will store it.
Source: https://parse.com/docs/rest#objects
I need to build an application wherein the admin must be able to define forms for data entry. The data to be entered is unknown to me. But the system will need to be able to support all the possible form fields (minus hidden fields, I suppose). So text areas, text fields, radios (with ability to specify what the options are), checkboxes, etc. Also, it needs to be able to support line item entries (similar to EE’s Matrix plugin).
Obviously, I don’t want to try to build this from the ground up. Are there any libraries I can use in CI to make life easier for me?
If none exist, what are some database design patterns I should consider for such a problem?
The best database-design for this is the Entity-Attribute-Value Model. For use with a FORM, essentially your form is the ENTITY, the Attribute will have a type (used for deciding how input will be captured, and data interpreted). Make sure that you index properly.
Remember that you'll only need to data to change the form, don't read from this model everytime you need to show a form. Store a flat file (.json is handy) of the finished form and read that when displaying the form.
Is there an existing library that would do this?
I want to be able to have code on the client side where the user chooses something, it makes a call to the server, and the server sends back "for this option, you need a have a text field called foo and a select field called bar with the following options, this one is selected, etc", and then the client side builds the next part of the form from that information. Or if they choose a different option, a different set of fields and values is returned from the server and populated on the screen. Also it might cascade so after the first selection we need a select field with some options, and then depending what they select on that select field the next field might be another select field or it might be a text input field.
Has anybody done anything like that? Is my best choice to have the AJAX call return some html that I just stuff into a div, or can I do it field by field and value by value?
If it matters, the back end is going to be written in Perl/MASON, and the front end will be using Javascript/JQuery/JQuery-UI.
I would use jquery and submit AJAX calls to whatever backend system you choose. Have this backend system compute the necessary changes and return the info as JSON. Let JQuery parse it for you and append the necessary form elements. However, it seems like under alot of use cases these decisions could be made on the client side without even talking to the server just as we pre validate form input before allowing posting to the server. I don't, however, have your requirements in front of me so I am sure there is a reason you want to get the info back from the server.
P.S. please do not return pure html from the back end to the client....ever.