Send a Slack message Action

Overview

When building an Automation, you may choose the "Send a Slack message" action. When the automation runs successfully, a corresponding Slack message will be sent to a specified Slack channel, containing the customizable information of your choosing during the automation configuration process.

Setup

After you have configured your base in the manner you choose, you can then begin configuring your automation. For this example, we will be setting up an automation that sends a notification to a channel in Slack when a project, in our Project Tracker template, is completed. 

First, we will set up a trigger to fire when a project enters a "Completed" view. In our Project Tracker base, we have created a filter that only allows projects from a completed checkbox field to enter the "Completed" view. To do this, choose the corresponding table and view within the base and test the trigger.  

After testing successfully, we can move onto setting up the action. To set up the "Send a Slack message" action click the blue "+ Add Action" button. Then, click on the "Send a Slack message" option. This will bring up a window with configuration options. If it is your first time creating this action, then you may need to "Manage connected accounts" or "Connect new account" before proceeding.

This will bring you to a "Connected Accounts" configuration window within Airtable. 

If you encounter an error during login, you may need to get in touch with your IT department or check your Slack account settings to enable this integration. After successfully connecting your Slack account to Airtable you can proceed with configuring the action.

You will then choose to either statically send the message to the same channel or user(s) every time, or you can dynamically message different channels or users. You can access the static channels and users available to your account by selecting from option(s) included in the drop down menu:

The other option is to dynamically configure where a message will be sent by clicking on the cog wheel next to the "Channel" input. Valid inputs can be email addresses, channel names (channel names must be prepended with a "#", eg #general instead of general), or Slack conversation IDs.

If you are inputting multiple inputs, ensure they are all separated with a comma. Note that Slack messages will be sent to each of the inputs individually. For example, if multiple email addresses are provided, we will send a DM to each of those people, and not create a group DM.

You can now set up your message to include custom information including text, emojis, and information from records in Airtable. After your message looks the way you want it to you must click "Run test" to ensure the action is working properly.

If the test runs successfully, then at this point it's a good idea to check your Slack channel to make sure everything looks the way you want it to. If so, you can now turn on the automation so that your custom notification sends out each time a project is completed.

@ Mentioning Slack users

Currently, to effectively @mention other Slack users in a message you will want to use the individual Slack user's ID. As mentioned in Slack's API reference webpage, you can manually retrieve a specific user's ID by clicking on the overflow button in their Slack profile and choosing the "Copy member ID" option, as shown in the screenshot.



Now that you have the member ID (a unique combination of letters and numbers) you can add this to the body of your Slack message automation in the action step using this format:

<@X012345678>

FAQs

How can I format my Slack messages?

• We recommend referencing this support article from Slack that lists the various ways that you can format your Slack message correctly.