Botkit: Send message to a user without him interacting to the bot using slack botkit

[jkjha]

I am sorry for openign this as an issue because I did not get any comment on my stackoverflow question.

have a slack bot which replies to a message send to a user. I do something like this:

import { slackbot } from 'botkit'
`startSlackRtm() {
    this.slackObject = slackbot({
        require_delivery: true
    });
    this.slackObject.log("Going to start the slack rtm connection. ");
    const slackBot = this.slackObject.spawn({
        retry: true,
        token: this.botConstants.token
    });
    slackBot.startRTM((err, bot, payload) => {
        if(err) {
            this.slackObject.log('error', "RTM connection failed. I will retry in a few seconds. ");
            return setTimeout(this.startSlackRtm(), 9000);
        }
        this.slackObject.log("Slack is running fine now. ");
    })
}
reply(bot, username, reply) {
    bot.reply({
        channel: username
    }, reply)
}
slackHears() {
    this.slackObject.hears(['.*'], ['direct_message', 'mention'], (bot, message) => {
        let userId = message.user, userProfile = {};
        bot.api.users.info({
            token: this.botConstants.token,
            user: userId
        }, async(err, res) => {
            if (err) this.slackObject.log("error", err);
            userProfile = res.user.profile;
            let username = userProfile.email.split("@")[0];
            this.reply(bot, this.botConstants.defaultChannel, feedbackDetail);
        })
    })
}`

But I have a use case where I just want to send a notification based on some kafka events or say simply I want to send a message to a user @tom without him interacting with my bot.

How can I do that.. any help will be highly appreciated. Please let me know if you are looking for any more information.

[rohilshah95]

use bot.say() for that instead of bot.reply

[jkjha]

can you please share a little more code (in my context)... because I have the bot object only when I hear for direct_message or mention... How can I directly use bot.say()?
Exa.

`this.slackObject.hears(['.*'], ['direct_message', 'mention'], (bot, message) => {
        let userId = message.user, userProfile = {};
        bot.api.users.info({
            token: this.botConstants.token,
            user: userId
        }, async(err, res) => {
            if (err) this.slackObject.log("error", err);
            userProfile = res.user.profile;
            let username = userProfile.email.split("@")[0];
            this.reply(bot, this.botConstants.defaultChannel, feedbackDetail);
        })
    `})``

[rohilshah95]

Wherever you are monitoring the alert that needs to be send out, inside that function, probably inside your if statement you can write:

controller.spawn({token: config.slack.token, retry: true}, function(bot) {
      bot.say({
          text: 'Some Text Here',
          channel: config.slack.channel
      });
});

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.