High Fidelity Slack Messages
Improved Slack message formatting for Missions
A challenging aspect of building message based workflows is designing the messages themselves. The right formatting can significantly improve the readability and usability of messages. Slack offers developers a lot of options for laying out messages with code, but ironically, these are out of reach of the average Slack user — until today! 😉
We’re excited to introduce a new “HiFi” Slack Message step to Missions, a message step to rule them all 👑.
Slack Message steps allow authors to unleash their will upon every aspect of a Slack message while providing finer grained control over buttons, dialog forms, attachments, and threading.
There are many combinations, so let’s run through a few examples.
Message Attachments
Attachments add richer formatting options to messages. You can add up to 20 attachments and each is grouped by a vertical color bar. Attachments offer a collection of properties you can set to make your messages look pro. 😎
Title, Author, Fields, Color, Footer, Images and Pretext 😵
The “Anatomy of a Slack Message” image above offers a peak at what each of these properties look like in context. In Missions, you can set each to static text or dynamic data from the Mission.
Here’s an example of a message created with Mission that displays details about a popular novel 🔮:
Buttons and Forms
Beyond formatting, messages can be interactive with buttons and dialog forms. Each attachment can have up to five buttons with an optional form. Pressing any one button completes the step. Subsequent steps can reference which button was pressed, who pressed it and any data collected from a form. For example, you can collect information in a form and send a new message including all that interesting data.
Threading and Updating Messages
Finally, the Slack Message step can be threaded or replace a previous message. This is really handy when a workflow is better contextualized within a thread or when updating a message with the current status of a workflow.
Let’s walk through an example from scratch that demonstrates how to use threading and updating messages effectively.
We think this is a big step forward, allowing you to harness the power of the Slack platform with greater flexibility and simplicity. In time the Slack Message step will replace 5 existing message based steps: Notify, ToDo, Claim, Yes/No, and Update Message. We’d love to hear what you think 🤠.
Missions is a messaging based workflow system for Slack that makes teams more productive by helping to coordinate activities between people to move work forward. Our visual editor enables anyone to create custom workflows for their team. Turbocharge your team today with Missions!
