slack-ruby / slack-ruby/slack-ruby-client
Cache translation from channel and user name to ID (translation prone to failure)
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- Ruby
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Description
When a channel name is given for a channel parameter, rather than a channel ID, we are using channels.list to look up the ID of the channel and then using the ID in the request instead of the name.
However, channels.list is a legacy method and is no longer guaranteed to return every channel. This leads to a channel_not_found error if you pass a channel name for a channel that is not supported by channels.list.
A couple suggested solutions:
- Update
channels_idto useconversations.listinstead ofchannels.list. The tricky thing about this is thatconversations.listonly works with pagination, so it's not a simple drop-in replacement. It also means that if you do something likechat_postMessage(channel: 'general', text: 'foo')then for a team with many channels you might end up making hundreds of paginated calls toconversations.listbefore actually hittingchat.postMessage, which is not ideal. If we use this solution I think we should change the readme to discourage this approach and encourage using channel IDs directly. - Remove the translation completely, which would be a breaking change (but not the worst breaking change, since it's already basically broken). Since using
conversations.listis not ideal for making the translation (see above) we could remove support for this altogether, forcing people to confront the issue directly. - Leave it as it is, and update the readme to note that it does not always work and discourage its use.
See #270 for more background.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start with lib/slack/web/api/mixins/channels.id.rb and the background in #270. Compare the three proposed approaches, including conversations.list pagination and the current README guidance, then establish which behavior should be supported. Done means the chosen channel-name translation policy is implemented and the README accurately documents it.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- ruby
- Domain
- api
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100