kelvinau / Google-Trends-Slackbot

Hackathon Demo in UBC Local Hack Day 2018 - A Slackbot that picks a Google Trends item and tells the summary of the top three.

Google Trends Slackbot

Hackathon Demo in UBC Local Hack Day 2018

A Slackbot that picks a Google Trends item and tells the summary of the top three.

Setup

• Upload this repository to the Slack Request URL location, and add config.ini for BOT_TOKEN, DB_SERVER, DB_ADMIN, DB_PASSWORD, DB_NAME, and DB_TABLE
• Setup bot (https://api.slack.com/bot-users) and enable app_mention in Event Subscriptions
• DB Table - CREATE TABLE {DB_TABLE} ( channel VARCHAR(256), user VARCHAR(256), conversation LONGTEXT, primary key (channel, user) );

How to use

Mention your bot and type top trend e.g.@bot top trend

What I learnt

Relying on Slackbot for the GUI is the biggest mistake

• Multi-line message is still not supported as of December 01, 2018 (earliest request started in 2015 https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/592923143309787136?lang=en)
• No custom styling for the option dropdown in interactive messages. If an item is too long, it is trimmed with '...'
• The request structures from Slack to your own server can be quite different, e.g. normal message (application/json) vs interactive messages (application/x-www-form-urlencoded with a key payload).