Passing along state to Interactive Messages handlers

[SamirBoulil]

Hi,

I used the starter-slapp-app as a bootstrap project for my bot. It really works fine and wanted to give you a big round of applause for the good work 👍 .

I was simply wondering if there was a way to pass along a state to interactive messages handlers.

Here is some code:
The interactive message I want to send with the state:

// This route is invoked previously where state is initialized.
slapp.route('handle_match_confirmation', (msg, state, duration) => {
  msg
  .say({
    channel: state.loserId,
    text: '',
    attachments: [{
      fallback: 'Match log confirmation',
      title: `Do you confirm that you lost ${state.winnerScore}-${state.loserScore} against <@${state.winnerId}> ?`,
      callback_id: 'match_confirmation_callback',
      color: '#3AA3E3',
      attachment_type: 'default',
      actions: [{
        name: 'match_confirmation',
        text: 'Yep, good game.',
        style: 'primary',
        type: 'button',
        value: 'yes'
      },
      {
        name: 'match_confirmation',
        text: 'NO WAY ! That\' a lie!',
        type: 'button',
        value: 'no'
      }]
    }]
  });
});

My handlers supposed to know the state:

slapp.action('match_confirmation_callback', 'match_confirmation', 'yes', (msg, value) => {
  msg.respond('Too bad, maybe next time :wink:!')
});
slapp.action('match_confirmation_callback', 'match_confirmation', 'no', (msg, value) => {
  msg.respond('What what what ? Someone is trying to cheat then. You need to see this IRL!')
});

The reason I want to pass the state along is because it contains slack_ids I use to send messages + other information regarding the business logic.

Thank you ;)

[mbrevoort]

Hi, thanks :)

Yes, actually the way we've done this is to serialize JSON into the value of the button action.

So we have utility functions like this:

let common = {

    // args takes a JSON stringify'd string and returns an object,
    // fails silently returning an empty object
    unmarshall: (str) => {
      try {
        return JSON.parse(str)
      } catch (ex) {
        console.error(`Error unmarshalling ${str}`, ex)
        return {}
      }
    },

    marshall: JSON.stringify
}

So then your button actions might look something like this:

      actions: [{
        name: 'match_confirmation_yes',
        text: 'Yep, good game.',
        style: 'primary',
        type: 'button',
        value: common.marshall({ id: 'some-id', value: 'yes' })
      },
      {
        name: 'match_confirmation_no',
        text: 'NO WAY ! That\' a lie!',
        type: 'button',
        value: common.marshall({ id: 'some-id', value: 'no' })
      }]

And your action handlers would unmarshall the value and then have an object to deal with:

slapp.action('match_confirmation_callback', 'match_confirmation_yes', (msg, args) => {
  args = common.unmarshall(args)
  // args.id is 'some-id'
  msg.respond('Too bad, maybe next time :wink:!')
});

slapp.action('match_confirmation_callback', 'match_confirmation_no', (msg, args) => {
  args = common.unmarshall(args)
  // args.id is 'some-id'
  msg.respond('What what what ? Someone is trying to cheat then. You need to see this IRL!')
});

[SamirBoulil]

Ok that's a neat trick ! It could be awesome to have the state being handled the same way routes does.

Thank you ;)