How to send a message to a channel in Slack in Qlik Application Automation

[Emile_Koslowski]

Including the Slack connector in your automations opens up many opportunities for alerting. This article will guide you in sending your first Slack message from within an automation.

For a more advanced use case, see How To: Send a message to a thread in Slack with Qlik Application Automation.

Guide:

1. Open the automation editor and search for the Slack connector in the left side menu.
2. Click the Slack connector and search for the block "Send Message", drag this block inside the editor, and attach it below the "Start" block.
3. Click on the "Send Message" in the editor to reveal its details menu on the right side of the editor.
4. Before writing your message, you'll need to connect your Slack account to the Slack connector in Qlik Application Automation. To do this, go to the "Connections" tab in the block's details menu and click "Add new connection". Follow the instructions in the popup that appears to link your Slack account.
5. Go to the "Inputs" tab in the block's details menu to start writing your message.
6. First, you need to specify the Slack channel to which you want to send the message.
   1. You can either use the lookup function (click the input field and then click "Do lookup" in the dropdown)
   2. Or you can copy this from inside Slack, open your channel and click the channel name to reveal the details menu. You'll find the channel id at the bottom of the menu.

      Note: the app/bot first needs to be a member of the channel before it can send messages to it.

      To add our app to a channel:

      1. Go to the channel and type /invite
      2. Click "Add apps to this channel"
      3. Search for "Qlik Application Automation" and add it to the channel
7. Now enter the content of your message in the "Text" input field.
   
8. Result:

Custom username & icon:

As shown in the above image, the message sender name and icon will default to the app's username and icon. If you want to use a customized username and icon, you can do so by specifying a username for the "Username" parameter. To use an emoji as the sender icon, specify one for the "Icon Emoji" parameter. For a custom image, specify a public URL for the "Icon Url parameter".

Example:

Result:

Attached to this message you'll find a JSON file containing the above blend.
 How to import a blend from a JSON file 

Related Content:

How To: Send a message to a thread in Slack with Qlik Application Automation