Conversation Queue & Bot Initiate Conversation about bolt-js HOT 13 CLOSED

Yeah so that is what we are doing already with the im.open piece, and it's working ok, although its a bit ugly. It also requires an existing msg object, which is not ideal like you said. It definitely would be a lot better to have an independent method that wouldn't be coupled to or hacked on to an existing conversation. For example, what if I wanted to bot to message a user as soon as it is booted up?

Also in order to be able to add correctly to a queue, I assume there would need to be some extra logic here, making it even more compelling as a helper method.

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Interesting, gonna think that through a bit.

In regards to having the bot message a different user, is it that you want the bot to @mention the user in the current channel, or send a dm, or in a new channel?

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For my particular use case, it would be sending a DM. Some type of method like:

slapp.directMessageUser('U12HSK2', 'hello there!').route('foobar')

Would be really great. In this case, the second argument would be the same as can normally be passed to msg.say(), so while it's a string here, it could be an object if it has buttons, attachments, etc.

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Gotcha, makes sense. I can see how it's awkward and error-prone trying to use the existing msg object to accomplish that. There is some context stored on the existing msg that would be needed to dm the new user (msg.meta.bot_token). This is what it would look like to do something like that w/ the raw client library:

// assuming someone says "bug U12HSK2" - would probably parse out @mention though
slapp.message(/bug (.+)/, (msg, userToBug) => {
  msg.say("you got it, I'll pester them now")

  var token = msg.meta.bot_token

  slapp.client.im.open({token, user: userToBug}, (err, data) => {
    if (err) {
      return console.error(err)
    }
    let channel = data.channel.id

    // it would be nice to have a new msg object w/ the channel default to the dm channel we acquired somehow
    msg.say({ channel: channel, text: 'Hi, just here to bug you!' })
  })
})

The issue there is mainly that we're re-using the same msg object, overriding the channel, and the way it is, route() won't work (it would be tied to the original user that messaged still). We've had a use case for taking a msg object and creating a new one from it w/ new context, i.e. a different user or channel (or both). This could be useful here too. Something like this, not sure on the name msg.copy though:

// assuming someone says "bug U12HSK2" - would probably parse out @mention though
slapp.message(/bug (.+)/, (msg, userToBug) => {
  msg.say("you got it, I'll pester them now")

  var token = msg.meta.bot_token

  slapp.client.im.open({token, user: userToBug}, (err, data) => {
    if (err) {
      return console.error(err)
    }
    let channel = data.channel.id

    // something like this to create a new msg scoped to the new user/channel (retains tokens and other metadata this way)
    msg.copy({ channel, user: userToBug })
      .say('Hey, just here to bug you!')
      .route('user-bugged')
  })
})

On the fence w/ wrapping the slapp.client.im.open() call with a helper, would be useful, but couples the library a bit more to a specific slack api (im.open), and adds more surface area to test/maintain.

from bolt-js.

Good point about opening up a message outside the context of receiving a message, definitely a use case we need to consider. The main challenge there is acquiring the tokens/meta-data on demand for the specific team of the user we want to message. Currently those are all provided via a request-enrichment model (on beep boop extracted from headers). It would be nice to have a generic way to grab team-specific meta-data in more of an ad-hoc fashion, and was agnostic to the persistence of those (similar to the current context lookup middleware). I could see it being an extension of the current context lookup middleware, or related.

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I'm entirely less experienced in this field, but is it not possible to get the token from the slapp instance after it connects? Or perhaps on initialization it could be grabbed?

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That approach would work if you were only concerned about a single slack team that your app has been added to, but you could potentially have many teams running your app.

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Hmm so perhaps you could specify the team as a parameter to the method and it could get that team's token?

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ya, something that generates a message object for you based on a team, and it would have the corresponding message.meta populated for you (with the tokens and all that other jazz you get via headers on beep boop currently).

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I'm wondering if there's any progress on this feature. I'm working on a bot supplying a small stats message each day to some of our channels.

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On the topic: is there currently any way to obtain the teams and bot tokens using BeepBoop platform? I want to implement a scheduled job per team sending a short message to one of the channels every morning.

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For those interested in the topic this seems to be the answer (using Slack Teams or/with Chronos Scheduler): https://beepboophq.com/docs/api

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I'm sorry to say, but the maintainers of this project (bolt-js) no longer support the slapp library. Please let us close this issue now.

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