topic Re: Slack actions failing for private channels in Workato Pros Discussion Board

Slack actions failing for private channels

jeff-sutton — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 02:58:20 GMT

We started getting channel_not_found when inviting users with the Slack action to private conversations. We are using the new (non-deprecated) slack actions. This was working fine until last night.

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

wotching — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 03:00:16 GMT

Thank God, we thought we were crazy... We are having the exact same issue ! Is it on the Slack side or Workato side, I wonder?

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

wotching — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 03:00:39 GMT

Deepak M

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

jeff-sutton — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 03:02:37 GMT

Good question, Balson!

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

wotching — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 03:04:38 GMT

😎

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

deepak23shastri — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 03:05:02 GMT

Will and I have been trying to figure it out and managed to identify its the same behavior for both Private and Public channel

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

jeff-sutton — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 03:08:08 GMT

What's interesting is if you do a custom API call conversations.list with limit of 999 and types private_channel - the newly channel doesn't even show up. Even though (in our case) the user created the channel (and is obviously a member).

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

ajorde — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 03:40:34 GMT

Occasionally when you add a new member to a private slack channel, Slack will create a brand new channel id and the original connection will be lost, even if you were referencing the channel by name. Slack must still keep the original channel somewhere but not allow it to be accessible.

Because of this, I always reference the channel id for slack rather than the channel name. I get the channel id by opening Slack in the browser and copying it from the url. I store IDs for my channels in a lookup table so that if this happens, it's easy to update the ID in any recipe/process that references that channel.

Interestingly, if you tag users in slack threads, and a user has changed their handle, a similar issue occurs - the ID seems to change in the background so user lookups via slack api don't always give the info you need.

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

deepak23shastri — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 05:10:02 GMT

Amanda Wong FYI

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

ryan-stewart — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 06:18:55 GMT

you may also be able to fix this by reinviting the slack bot to the channel.

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

gordonhuworkato — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 09:58:15 GMT

Hi Jeff,

My experience with private channel is that the the bot/service user will need to be in the channel. Did u remember how those private channels were created and if the bots were still inside?

Related topics: during annual api key rotation, we regenerated the key, uninstalled and re-installed the custom app in order for some tokens to be regenerated. As a result, the bot was removed from all channels - particularly the private ones. It was a pain to add them back 😅. So...the lesson is ... plan ahead.

Gordon

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

torourke — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 11:24:15 GMT

Not sure if this helps at all but we had the same issue. Our recipe creates a public channel when a P1 incident occurred and then invites the users who were on-call. The create slack channel action was working but the invite users action was not and was giving a misleading error of channel_not_found. I created a custom api call for the invite user action instead of using the workato built one and then the error went away and our recipe is working again.

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

wotching — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 12:07:30 GMT

Curious... How did you guys end up planning ahead to avoid this issue in the future?

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

amanda1 — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 15:07:21 GMT

Hi Jeff Sutton, Will Balson, Deepak M, thank you for raising this. We have identified an issue with the Slack connector action "Invite users to conversation" and are working on a fix ASAP.

Re: Slack actions failing for private channels

jeff-sutton — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 23:14:45 GMT

Thanks Amanda!

We have also created a custom action (as Tony did) but we use this action in dozens of recipes and changing all of them will take hours. I'm sure it's best practice to use variables for everything, but we pull data pills from actions and creating a custom action breaks all the following steps, whuch we then have to identify and resolve.

Since the Slack connector is an essential part of our (and I assume many) automations, I hope this is resolved asap.