Calling ack outside of synchronous request/response?

[bodepd]

Hi,

I'm doing a POC to see if I can process slack events as a two step process

1. receive events, write slack events/actions into a MQ
2. process events out of a message queue, perform actions

I have it working (for the most part) with the two parts being:

1. a proxy setup with a regular adapter (tested with flask and socket_mode) and an app.middleware that takes the request, writes it to the queue, then returns a BoltResponse
2. a custom adapter - that polls for messages off the queue and converts them into BoltRequest objects

All of this is working as a POC. however, I am seeing issues with handling events/actions asynchronously, given the synchronous nature of ack during request/resp.

I can get ack working if I have my proxy (part 1 from above) return a bolt response with 200 status code and an empty body. I think this is fine for me to handle acknowledgments simply as "yes we have received and written to our queue".

However, decoupling receipt of data from slack with the data processors doesn't seem to work well for cases where you need to pass extra data to the ack method (like examples from the documentation where you pass ack(resonse_action='update').

is there a way to perform ack completely async from the request that will work both in web server and socket modes (ie: something like an ack API method that accepts a trigger-id)?

The slack_bolt version

slack-both=1.9.2

[seratch]

Hi @bodepd, thanks for writing in!

a custom adapter - that polls for messages off the queue and converts them into BoltRequest objects

This is a nice hack 👍

The easiest approach to run some time consuming code would be to utilize lazy listeners. https://slack.dev/bolt-python/concepts#lazy-listeners With this way, you can move any time-consuming tasks to lazy listener functions. Although the document says it's for FaaS (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, etc.), it's useful for any apps.

is there a way to perform ack completely async from the request that will work both in web server and socket modes (ie: something like an ack API method that accepts a trigger-id)?

However, as for the ack(response_action="...") use cases, unfortunately there is no way to do it asynchronously (even with lazy listeners). The ack() method call has to be synchronously done within 3 seconds (as an HTTP response or a WebSocket message in Socket Mode).

I hope this was helpful and you'll find a reasonable solution for your use case 👋

[seratch]

👋 @bodepd Let us know if you need more help here! If we don't hear back for a few more days, we'll close this issue.

[bodepd]

I got my question answered. thanks!