Listening to actions

Your app can listen to user actions like button clicks, and menu selects, using the action method.

Actions can be filtered on an action_id of type string or RegExp object. action_ids act as unique identifiers for interactive components on the Slack platform.

You’ll notice in all action() examples, ack() is used. It is required to call the ack() function within an action listener to acknowledge that the request was received from Slack. This is discussed in the acknowledging requests section.

info

Since v2, message shortcuts (previously message actions) now use the shortcut() method instead of the action() method. View the migration guide for V2 to learn about the changes.

View more information about the block_actions payload within the relevant API documentation page. To access the full payload of a view from within a listener, reference the body argument within your callback function.

// Your listener function will be called every time an interactive component with the action_id "approve_button" is triggered
app.action('approve_button', async ({ ack }) => {
  await ack();
  // Update the message to reflect the action
});

Listening to actions using a constraint object

You can use a constraints object to listen to callback_ids, block_ids, and action_ids (or any combination of them). Constraints in the object can be of type string or RegExp object.

// Your listener function will only be called when the action_id matches 'select_user' AND the block_id matches 'assign_ticket'
app.action({ action_id: 'select_user', block_id: 'assign_ticket' },
  async ({ body, client, ack, logger }) => {
    await ack();
    try {
      // Make sure the action isn't from a view (modal or app home)
      if (body.message) {
        const result = await client.reactions.add({
          name: 'white_check_mark',
          timestamp: body.message.ts,
          channel: body.channel.id
        });

        logger.info(result);
      }
    }
    catch (error) {
      logger.error(error);
    }
  });