Slack

Slack is a messaging app for businesses that improves communication, teamwork, and decision-making. It allows people to collaborate easily, work on their own time, and share information in dedicated chat spaces.

Before setting up

Before you can connect you need to make sure that you have a Slack account and you are part of a specific workspace.

Enable webhooks

If you want to use Slack webhooks, you’ll need to add Blackbird bot to the channels you’re interested in after you’ve created a connection. There are two ways to do this.

The first way:

• Select a channel.
• Send a message with @Blackbird content.
• Click Add to channel.
• Do the same for other channels you’re interested in.

The second way:

• Go to the channel you selected during connection creation.
• Find added an integration to this channel: Blackbird message.
• Click on Blackbird -> Add this app to a channel… -> select a channel from dropdown.
• Do the same for other channels you’re interested in.

Connecting

1. Navigate to apps and search for Slack. If you cannot find Slack then click Add App in the top right corner, select Slack and add the app to your Blackbird environment.
2. Click Add Connection.
3. Name your connection for future reference e.g. ‘My organization’.
4. Click Authorize connection.
5. Follow the instructions that Slack gives you, allowing Blackbird to access the selected workspace.
6. When you return to Blackbird, confirm that the connection has appeared and the status is Connected.

Actions

Messages

• Send message sends a message to a Slack channel. Add a text message, attachments or both. Optionally send the message in a thread
• Get message returns message information, including attachments if it has any
• Delete message
• Send scheduled message
• Update message

Reactions

• Add reaction adds a reaction to a message.
• Remove reaction removes a reaction from a message.
• Get reactions lists all reactions for a single message.

Channels

• Create channel

Users

• Get all users retrieves a list of users in a Slack team.
• Get user information.
• Get user by email.
• Get user profile.
• Get team.

Events

• On message is triggered when any new message is sent to a channel. This event has a parameter Trigger on message replies which is False by default. If you want your bird to trigger on channel messages and message replies, set this parameter to True. If you use On channel message with Send message in thread in a single flow, you should set Trigger on message replies to False or leave it unspecified to avoid an infinite loop. If you want your bird to trigger only when a message has file attachments, set the Trigger only when message has files to True, default is False.
• On app mentioned is triggered when the app is mentioned (@Blackbird). Useful to create workflow triggers that only start when specifically invoked by a user through Slack.
• On member joined channel.
• On reaction added. Can be configured to a specific channel and a specific emoji.

Example

Here, whenever a new message with attachments is sent, we download the files, upload them to Google Drive and add new rows to Google Sheets table with information about the uploaded files.

Missing features

Slack is a huge app with a lot of features. If any of these features are particularly interesting to you, let us know!

Feedback

Do you want to use this app or do you have feedback on our implementation? Reach out to us using the established channels or create an issue.