In messaging platforms like Slack and HipChat you can integrate apps that can post messages to groups without them being sent from a user e.g.
Defect Management System: A new defect was logged at 12pm
Instead of:
John Smith: A new defect was logged at 12pm
Is it possible to do the same thing in Yammer?
There are two options available for you:
1 - You can create a new user on Yammer, name it however you want (e.g., "Defect Management System" with a snazzy avatar), then take the user's OAUTH token and use it to impersonate that user programmatically. This is fine for quick development.
2 - You can create a new user on Yammer, name it however you want, then register a new app on Yammer to get a permanent token and client ID, then use those to impersonate that user programmatically. This is the right way to do it. You can read more about how to do this on https://developer.yammer.com/introduction/#gs-registerapp.
This is an example of a user that we impersonate. It is a bot on our network. It is a separate account in AD and is registered as an app in Yammer and interacts with Yammer automatically.
You are always impersonating a user in Yammer via the API, there isn't a way to impersonate a group, in the way that Slack does (i.e. being able to override the username displayed and replace it with a bot for example in your payload)
If this app is for internal use, you could consider creating a dummy user as a bot to post defects, and then using Custom Object Types & Actions in Open Graph to further customize the messages. Obviously there are some business & administration considerations in doing that, not just development ones.
Related
We are integrating Google Calendar with our room booking system. Users in GSuite domain should login on our reservation screen and book a room. So far I made use of an service account with domain wide delegation to impersonate the users (the setSubject() method, passing the e-mail address of the impersonated user). Everything works, although this way we cannot verify if the user we want to impersonate is logged in successfully or not, the event will be just created with him as the organizer, because setSubject() only requires the email to work properly.
In IBM Domino, when using an Java XPage I was able to compare passwords of the user, not in plain text but there was a function which compared plain text with user's hashed password and returned true if they were equal.
As I see Google doesn't have such a thing if I'm right. How could I check if the user can successfully log in programmatically?
If you want to perform actions in Google Calendar on behalf of a currently logged-in user from a web browser, you might want to use OAuth2 for Web Server Applications instead of using a service account with impersonation.
Just looking for some general advice here.
I want to build a Slack app and publish it publicly to the Slack App Directory, for anyone to use. The basics of the app are:
When you paste a link to a specific domain in a Slack message, a bot will fetch additional information about that link from a Rest API my company built.
The roadblock I'm running into is that our Rest API uses Basic Auth for authentication, and I can't figure how or where in the Slack App setup flow to ask the user to enter their API key.
Does anyone have any advice on how to ask for user input when setting up a Slack app, so that the user can enter their API Key for our REST API?
Thanks!
OK, I will assume that the API key is individual to each user.
I would suggest to ask the API key as part of the installation process for your Slack app on your website and then store the connection between Slack user ID and API key as part of the installation process. It is in fact possible to have individual installations of the same Slack app to a workspace for each user. This is called "configurations" (e.g. the Twitter app for Slack is using this feature).
This requires each user who want to use the app to go through the installation process and also all users need to have permissions to install this particular Slack app (which can be configured by admin).
So I'm building a small Slack bot that I want multiple users to be able to use in different Slack teams. So far the workflow is like this:
User signs up on website.
User connects with an API provider and receives their OAuth credentials. The access token for each user is saved in the database.
User adds Slack bot to their team.
With hardcoded API values the bot retrieves the desired data, but what is the best way for the bot to be able to get the appropriate data for each Slack team?
I obviously don't want a user to need to keep signing into the website etc, so how do I associate the slack team with the Laravel user and then pull the relevant API data?
For some example code, imagine that I have a Strava access token stored in my DB for a user and I want to call the API:
$botman->hears('runstats', function ($bot) {
$payload = \Strava\Account::get(
\Auth::user()->strava_id,
array('api_key' => "here_is_a_secret_key")
);
$bot->reply($payload->monthly_kms);
This works fine when I query from my web interface as I'm signed into my website and it spits back 123km as an example.
Obviously when I'm signed into Slack then there's no Auth::user instance and so it cannot find the relevant Strava ID. That's what I want to be able to retrieve for the relevant Slack user. I envisage it being installed in multiple Slack workspaces.
You need to store the relation between a Slack user (with team ID, user ID) and his individual token for each API in your database.
So you have two options when adding new API tokens:
Ensure that the process of adding new tokens for API services is always started on Slack (e.g. with a slash command) and then forward the user to your webpage. Thus your app knows which user it is.
Let users log into your web-page with their Slack credentials (using Slack Sign-in).
Both options require that your Slack app has been previously installed to the relevant team of course.
Imagine I have a Slack app. After someone logs in with his or her Slack account,
I get their team ID.
Is it possible to use this team ID to get a list of all users that belong to
the same team as the logged in one?
What I tried
I looked at the users.list request
in the Slack docs, but it appears that it returns only those users who are in
the same team as me (i. e. I can get a list of my colleagues, but not those of
another user). In particular, there is no way to specify the team id.
Yes, that is possible. The Slack team is linked to the access token you use for users.list. If you use your own access token, you will of course only get the users from your own team.
To get the users from other Slack teams you need to use the access token your Slack app received during installation to that team (e.g. via Slack button). Your Slack app will also need the OAuth permission scopes users:read.
I'm building mobile applications using .NET. What I'm looking for is a way to manage user sessions and info using Azure Mobile Services. I've read a lot about the authentication in Azure Mobile Services, but this only authenticates a user via Facebook, Twitter, etc ... to access azure services.
I'm looking for user session management, i.e. register, login, logout. Be able to save and retrieve user info, i.e., save certain info against the user such as age for example. Also session management and caching, i.e. the user will remain logged on when the app is closed and re-opened. Also azure mobile services doesn't seem to provide a way to allow me to register users via email.
Basically, If anyone is familiar with Parse, I'm looking for having similar functionality in Azure. Can anyone help please ?
Thanks
Out of the box, Mobile Services provides easy authentication with social providers (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and Azure Active Directory. If you want to do registration via email, you'll have to create a custom auth system. This is going to be more complex than just flipping a switch and using Facebook auth, but totally doable and I can point you in the right direction. First, check out this post that will explain how you can create a registration / login system using custom API and the script backend. If you're using a .NET backend, you'll need to alter thing a bit (the samples are in JS) but it should be pretty easy to convert. The only piece that is really missing from that post is how to do email verification. To do this with Mobile Services, I would suggest the following.
Sign up for a SendGrid account (free in the Azure store)
From your script, after registering the user, generate a random alphanumeric string that is saved to their account / user record in the table.
Use the same string to create a URL which you can send to the user's email address (check out this tutorial for sending email via SendGrid and Mobile Services).
The link can either go to a different custom API or a web front end. When that endpoint is hit, it should update the user record to show that they have verified their email address.