Boltworks

A collection of various extensions for Slack's bolt library to help you more easily make better slackbots.

docs

The main features are:

• A fast and flexible way of posting nested information in a dynamically expandable GUI format
• Easy CLI parsing using the ArgParse library (or an automagic function parser that determines what params you need)
• Easy callbacks on buttons and other GUI elements

Getting Started

pip install boltworks

Follow the instructions at https://github.com/slackapi/bolt-python to begin setting up a Slackbot. Note that BoltWorks is not presently designed for async use, but any of the non-async handlers should work. For testing purposes, socket mode tends to be the easiest. All the rest of the demos will assume you've already instantiated a slack app.

NodeTreeUI - dynamic nested information formatter

See main article: docs/treenode.md

(also see the TreeNodeUI class in docs)

This module allows you to display complex nested information neatly, in a user-clickable, expanding and contracting view. The TreeNodeUI class handles all the logic of formatting these trees and responding to clicks.

Easy CLIs with the @argparse_command decorator

argparse_command in docs

This allows you to use Python's argparse library to process complex command line flags and options in Slack Commands. As usual, a --help flag will be generated for you. And if your method is type hinted, you can use Automagic mode to create a parser automagically.

All Slack parameters will be passed through to your method; you can use the 'args' catchall, and/or individual arguments like 'respond' or 'context' etc All other parameters will be parsed from the command string when the command is run.

The explicit way

# example taken from the argparser docs: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/argparse.html#conflicting-options

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="calculate X to the power of Y")
group = parser.add_mutually_exclusive_group()
group.add_argument("-v", "--verbose", action="store_true")
group.add_argument("-q", "--quiet", action="store_true")
parser.add_argument("x", type=int, help="the base")
parser.add_argument("y", type=int, help="the exponent")
@app.command("/exponent")
@argparse_command(parser)
def power_calculator(respond,x,y,verbose,quiet):
    answer = x**y
    if quiet:
        respond(text=answer)
    elif verbose:
        respond(text=f"{x} to the power {y} equals {answer}")
    else:
        respond(text=f"{x}^{y} == {answer}")
                    
          

The automagic way

If you set automagic on, then providing an ArgParser is optional. Any type-hinted arguments not handled by an ArgParser you pass will be automagically added to an argparser with the appropriate names and types set. Lists, Optionals, Literals, default arguments, and primitive types all are supported.

from boltworks import argparse_command

@app.command(re.compile("/exponent"))
@argparse_command(automagic=True)
def power_calculator(respond, x: int, y:int, mode:Optional[Literal["q","v"]]=None):
    answer = x**y
    if mode=="q":
        respond(text=answer)
    elif mode=="v":
        respond(text=f"{x} to the power {y} equals {answer}")
    else:
        respond(text=f"{x}^{y} == {answer}")

ActionCallbacks - easy callback serialization

ActionCallbacks in docs

This class allows you to easily serialize a method as a callback for a Slack UI element such as a button. These callbacks can themselves post UI elements with more callbacks for more complicated logic, and you can always use the partial class to inject some arguments into the callback method at the time you are creating the callback, as in the below example.

DISK_CACHE_DIR="~/.diskcache"
from boltworks import ActionCallbacks,DiskCacheKVSTore
from diskcache import Cache

disk_cache=DiskCacheKVStore(Cache(directory=DISK_CACHE_DIR))
callbacks=ActionCallbacks(app,disk_cache.using_serializer(dill))

def get_elapsed_time(args:Args, start:datetime):
    diff = datetime.now() - start
    formatted_diff = f"{diff.seconds//3600:02d}:{(diff.seconds%3600)//60:02d}:{diff.seconds%60:02d}"
    args.respond(f"time elapsed: {formatted_diff}")
    
def start_timer(args:Args):
  now=datetime.now()
  get_elapsed_button=callbacks.get_button_register_callback("get elapsed time",partial(get_elapsed_time,start=now))
  timer_started_message="Timer started at "+now.strftime("%A, %B %d, %Y %I:%M:%S %p")
  block=slack_sdk.models.blocks.SectionBlock(text=timer_started_message,accessory=get_elapsed_button)
  args.say(blocks=[block])

start_timer_button=callbacks.get_button_register_callback("start a timer",start_timer)
timer_start_block=slack_sdk.models.blocks.SectionBlock(text="click here to start a timer",accessory=start_timer_button)
app.client.chat_postMessage(blocks=[timer_start_block],channel=CHANNEL_ID)

ThreadCallbacks

Similiar to ActionCallbacks, this class allows you to register a message's ts (timestamp used by slack as a message id), so that your callback will be called any time a message is posted to that Thread.