microsoft-dx/mic-slack-integration

Slack Integration for the Microsoft Innovation Center Team

Microsoft Innovation Center Slack Integration

Slack Integration for the Microsoft Innovation Center Team using Asp.Net WebApi, SignalR, Autofac and Azure SQL

Introduction

Purpose of the project

• people that are not members of our Slack team to be able to post messages in a dedicated channel

• team members to be able to reply to messages using a slash command

Implementation

We broke down the project in two parts:

• posting messages to a Slack channel from a public web page

• posting messages from Slack to the public web page

Posting messages to Slack from a public web page

This part of the project was implemented using Incoming WebHooks

We set up a new Incoming WebHook for a specific channel and received a WebHook URL that we used to post the messages from the public web page.

The message post functionality is done by SlackClient.cs , with SlackMessage as message model.

Posting messages from Slack to the public web page

This part was implemented using Slash Commands.

When the message starts with /command-name, a post is created to a URL that you can set up in the Slack Integration for a slash command console, with command-name also set up in the console.

Implementation

Both scenarios are implemented inside a WebApi controller, SlackController with two methods: PostMessageToSlack and PostMessageToWeb.

The final goal is for public messages to appear both in the web page and the specific Slack channel.

So, both methods in the controller post the messages to the Slack channel and to the public web application in real-time (the real-time functionality for the web page is achieved using SignalR)

Basically, each controller method does the following:

SlackClient.PostMessage(message);

ConnectionManager.GetHubContext<SlackHub>().Clients.All.addMessage(message.UserName, message.Text);

SlackMessageStore.SaveMessage(message);

(Since we use Autofac for Dependency Injection, there is no need for the GlobalHostglobal object to retrieve the hub context - see the Autofac Docs or this repo for an example and for more information on using SignalR and Autofac )

The PostMessagemethod from SlackClient basically does an HTTP Post to the Uri provided by the Slack Incoming WebHook.

The SlackMessageStore has the message store functionality that stores the messages in an Azure SQL Database.

Building the project

In order to build the project, you need to add two .config files in the root of the API project:

• appSettings.config

    <appSettings> 
      <add key="SlackWebHookUri" value={web_hook_uri}/>
      <add key="SlackCommandToken" value={command_token}/>
    </appSettings>```
  
  

• connectionStrings.config

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <connectionStrings> <add name="SlackDbConnectionString" connectionString = {connection_string} /> </connectionStrings>

If you don't need it, you can exclude the message store and the SQL Database, but you must remove the dependencies for SlackMessageStore and for SlackDbContext, and the not register SlackDbContext with the builder.

builder.RegisterType<SlackDbContext>() .WithParameter("connectionString", ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["SlackDbConnectionString"].ConnectionString) .InstancePerRequest();

Next steps

• create a decent UI for the public web page

• create support for automatic responses

• add support for attachments in messages

Conclusion

This repo can be used for integrating Slack with any service that has a REST or .NET API, since it implements both Slash Commands and Incoming WebHooks.