Bolt-js: Limitations on options

[dschinkel]

I am finding that I literally can't build features anymore on Slack. You limit checkboxes to 10, you limit dropdown choices to 100. So things like prompting for country, prompting for skills, etc. is not possible. What's the point in using this API then if we can't even put a decent amount of data in your views?

[misscoded]

Hi @dschinkel! Thanks for providing us this feedback -- it’s helpful for us to understand what limitations folks are coming up against when interacting with the API.

I’ll make sure to pass this feedback onto the appropriate team, but for general feedback that has to do with the API rather than the Bolt framework, we recommend using the /feedback command within Slack itself. Doing so will get your feedback to the appropriate team more quickly, and someone can optionally follow up with you on it.

I'm going to close this issue since it isn't related to Bolt, but feel free to continue commenting on this thread if you have more questions or further feedback on this topic. 🙂

[stevengill]

Hey @dschinkel,

Just to add a bit, you could use external select with min_query_length: 0 for dropdown menus to get around the 100 limit. We don't have a workaround for the checkboxes though.

[dschinkel]

Thanks. I was hoping not to have to use that TBH @stevengill because it seems weird to me do do something like that out of band. I prefer to hit my backend myself and code that iterating and creating the options myself in the views with my own code, hit my backend service myself and create my own helpers to create those checkboxes. It's weird to have to manually paste stuff into the app and have Slack request that kinda of data for me, it's out of context with the way I code which is all custom code. And I doubt your API could itself hit a graphQL endpoint anyway, it's not a REST endpoint.

The two things I tried to do which I could not due to the huge limitations:

• Prompt a user for the country they live in. There are over 200 countries out there!
• provide a list of a bunch of languages for people to select to specify what they code in. 10 items in a list doesn't do much for anyone in terms of checkboxes

Both these allow people to sign up and create an account which will show up ultimately on my website and slack was a great way to get people to create a profile since I already have a community.

@misscoded I used the feedback form to send info on those limitations. Thanks!

[dschinkel]

@misscoded

I’ll make sure to pass this feedback onto the appropriate team

Any response from the POs there? This really needs to be pushed up in priority. Up those limits to 300. People are complaining about this in my app and I don't blame them, it's weird to split up a country dropdown into 3.

I cannot use external_select because it doesn't allow any way to put a graphQL query there (I am not using RESTful web services) and I don't want to be putting stuff like this outside my app anyway for lists. That section (Select Menus)only allows you to put one url anyway.

I think the whole situation is dumb...having people putting an external URL and the bogus limitation to begin with on dropdowns and only 10 items per checkbox lists. Make that 50. It's on us to make that performant if we want to flex that number of items.

[stevengill]

Hey @dschinkel,

The best avenue for submitting feedback for this is by using the /feedback slash command. Support will route your feedback to the appropriate place and if there is a response, they will share it with you in the zendesk ticket.