Responding to actions

There are two main ways to respond to actions. The first (and most common) way is to use say(), which sends a message back to the conversation where the incoming request took place.

The second way to respond to actions is using respond(), which is a utility to use the response_url associated with the action.

Refer to the module document to learn the available listener arguments.

# Your listener will be called every time an interactive component with the action_id “approve_button” is triggered
@app.action("approve_button")
def approve_request(ack, say):
    # Acknowledge action request
    ack()
    say("Request approved 👍")

Using respond()

Since respond() is a utility for calling the response_url, it behaves in the same way. You can pass all the message payload properties as keyword arguments along with optional properties like response_type (which has a value of "in_channel" or "ephemeral"), replace_original, delete_original, unfurl_links, and unfurl_media. With that, your app can send a new message payload that will be published back to the source of the original interaction.

# Listens to actions triggered with action_id of “user_select”
@app.action("user_select")
def select_user(ack, action, respond):
    ack()
    respond(f"You selected <@{action['selected_user']}>")