Routing Notifications through Slack

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Notifications are a great way to display information in Slack from sources outside of your Slack workspace, like your Google Calendar. Using the Slack API to create a message in a channel or direct message with contents from another service is made easy in Transposit.

Creating a notification trigger

In order to be useful, Notifications are best done as an automated process. In Transposit, there are two major ways to do this.

Scheduled Tasks

If your notification needs to happen at a specified time on a regular basis, such as weekly, monthly, and so on, scheduled tasks are what you are looking for.

Scheduled Tasks can either be used only with Slack for something like a weekly reminder to update your sprint board, or with other integrations to help you with tasks such as relaying the weather for the day with Dark Sky. Learn more at the Scheduled Tasks docs page.

Webhooks

If your notification has no scheduled time and instead needs to happen as soon as another activity has happened, webhooks are what you need.

To start a webhook operation, you will need to select a service that has webhook POSTing built in. Examples of services that do this are Twilio, Jira, and GitHub. Learn more about creating webhooks in Transposit at our docs page. Through a webhook, you can get data about what happened in the event, when it happened, and more, which can be passed into your notification.

Sending a notification in Slack

To send your notification in Slack, you can use a few different Slack API calls.

  • post_chat_message is the standard message that will be viewed by everyone in the channel.
  • post_chat_me_message is functionally the same as above but in "/me" formatting.
  • post_chat_ephemeral is an ephemeral chat message that will only be visible to a specified user, and will not persist across multiple Slack sessions.

Follow our Quickstart for an example of sending a Slack message through Transposit. You can customize your message with Slack Block Kit to have it look the way you want it to.

Further reading

If you would like to send your message as a bot user, look at our documentation for chatbots.

To create workflows through your notifications, look at our documentation for workflows.

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