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I'm building a slack FAQ app that uses message reactions to gather the best answers to questions. My plan is to save any Slack messages with positive reactions by using the reaction_added event to get the TS attribute and then the conversations.history method to get the message's content.

This works well for parent-level or non-threaded messages, however it doesn't work for reply messages inside threads. For some reason the conversations.history method returns an unrelated message when using the TS of a thread reply.

I've checked the Slack API conversations.history method documentation to see if replies are handled in any special way. I reviewed conversations.replies method to see if it might be helpful, but since reaction_added event simply provides a TS id for the message and no thread_ts value that can be used with the conversations.replies method.

I'm using bolt framework. Here's a snippet of the code that tries to use the reaction_added event with conversations.history method to get the message content:

app.event('reaction_added', async ({ event, context, say }) => {
  try {
    const result = await app.client.conversations.history({
      token: process.env.SLACK_USER_TOKEN,
      channel: event.item.channel,
      latest: event.item.ts,
      limit: 1,
      inclusive: true
    });
    save(`${result.messages[0].text}`);
  }
  catch (error) {
    console.error(error);
  }
});

Expected result: Message contents of thread reply that a reaction is posted for

Actual result: Message contents of the latest message in the slack channel

Erik Kalkoken
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Roman Sheydvasser
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  • Possible duplicate of [I want to find thread message and delete it with slack-api](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52657092/i-want-to-find-thread-message-and-delete-it-with-slack-api) – Erik Kalkoken Oct 19 '19 at 16:59
  • The difference is this question is specifically asking for advice in finding a thread message when all you have a `reaction_added` event, which doesn't provide the required `thread_ts` attribute for finding a thread message. – Roman Sheydvasser Oct 20 '19 at 21:10
  • You are right. Just repeated your example and the `reaction_added` event does not include the `thread_ts` property, which you would need to identify the related message in a thread. Looks like a missing feature to me, so I would suggest opening as support request to Slack about this. – Erik Kalkoken Oct 21 '19 at 12:35
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    Thanks, I did. I'll continue looking for workarounds too and post here if I find something. – Roman Sheydvasser Oct 22 '19 at 13:54
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    I also contact Slack support about this. I think it would be trivial for them to add it so I hope they can. – RancheroBeans Nov 26 '19 at 19:38

1 Answers1

3

I'm not sure if it changed recently or I misread the documentation, but conversations.replies API endpoint does not require a thread_ts value containing the parent thread timestamp in order to retrieve a thread reply.

The event.item.ts value provided by the reaction_added event is sufficient to retrieve the message contents of the reply where a reaction was added.

So to get the message contents of a message where a reaction was added, you can update the code in my original question to:

app.event('reaction_added', async ({ event, context, say }) => {
  try {
    const result = await app.client.conversations.replies({
      token: process.env.SLACK_USER_TOKEN,
      channel: event.item.channel,
      ts: event.item.ts
    });
    save(`${result.messages[0].text}`);
  }
  catch (error) {
    console.error(error);
  }
});
Roman Sheydvasser
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