Botkit: Validating usernames typed in message.text

[musicaljoeker]

I'm curious if there is an easy way with this framework to get a list of all the users in the channel. I would be using this list to see if a user-typed handle is a valid user in the channel. Is there something like the channels.list in the native Slack API?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[agamrafaeli]

@musicaljoeker I think this has yet to be implemented. Though sounds like an interesting endeavour so I might try to tackle it on my own

[jonchurch]

You can use almost all Slack API Methods from the bot object. Here is some info in Botkit docs,

You can get a list of members of a channel by calling the following and finding the members array in the channel object you will get back.

bot.api.channels.info('CHANNEL_ID', function(err, response) {})

[musicaljoeker]

I'm having some issues getting the response right, and I'm not sure I'm calling this the proper way.
Here is what I have:
bot.api.channels.info(channel, function(err, response) { bot.reply(message, "ChannelID: " + channel + "\n" + "Response: " + JSON.stringify(response)); });

What I'm getting back is a JSON object saying that the error is invalid_form_data. Does the first parameter in the bot.api.channels.info need to be a string or an object? I see you have it listed as a string above, but in the documentation I see a blank object. Or perhaps I'm doing something else wrong?

Your assistance is much appreciated!

[jonchurch]

Oops! You need to pass it a key value pair in an object.

controller.hears('test', 'direct_mention', function(bot, message) {
    bot.api.channels.info({channel: message.channel}, function(err, res) {
        if (err) console.log('ERR:',err)
        else console.log('============CHANNELS LIST INFO:\n', res)
    })
})

This will give you back a channel object that has an array contain user ID's of the channel members. I think if you look in dev4slack there have been some people who have asked similar questions to matching usernames with ID's.

If you aren't a part of the slack team sign up here

[jonchurch]

@musicaljoeker Checkout PR #367

Haven't used this myself, and it isn't complete, but is a place to start for you perhaps.

[musicaljoeker]

Thank you for providing that code above. That supplied exactly what I needed and solved my problem.