With the introduction of the Botkit Message Pipeline, a few things changed about the way message events are emitted that may impact developers who built their bot using an earlier version of Botkit.
Though we've made fairly substantial under-the-hood changes to Botkit in this version, most bots should continue to function without requiring any changes. However, as a precaution, we urge developers to carefully test their bot with the new version of Botkit before going live.
Inside your Botkit application's root folder, run the command:
npm update --save botkit
This will cause your version of Botkit to be updated to the latest available version (0.6.0), and your package.json file will be modified.
Alternately, you can edit your package.json file by hand, changing the version option for Botkit to '^0.6'.
Facebook Bots that use the receive_via_postback option, and Slack bots that use the interactive_replies option may require small updates.
In the past, it was sometimes possible for Botkit to emit more than one event per incoming message - in particular, when handling button click events as typed user text. This double-event behavior was enabled by configuration switches - one for Facebook, and one for Slack - which are now deprecated.
As of version 0.6, incoming messages will only ever emit a single event.
These button click events can will now have the button payload value included as the message.text property, and can thus be treated like other types of user messages.
The receive_via_postback option is no longer needed to receive button clicks as typed messages in conversations. They will now be captured automatically.
In addition, developers can now include facebook_postback in the list
of events when specifying hears() patterns. This will allow button clicks
and other postback events to trigger heard patterns.
Developers who previously used receive_via_postback may want to add facebook_postback to their hears() handlers to ensure no functionality is lost.
controller.hears('welcome','facebook_postback', function(bot, message) {
// respond when a user clicks a button with the payload value "welcome"
});
The interactive_replies is no longer needed to receive button clicks as typed messages in conversations. They will now be captured automatically.
In addition, developers can now include interactive_message_callback in the list of events when specifying hears() patterns. This will allow button clicks to trigger heard patterns.
Developers who previously used interactive_replies may want to add interactive_message_callback to their hears() handlers to ensure no functionality is lost.
controller.hears('welcome','interactive_message_callback', function(bot, message) {
// respond when a user clicks a button with the value set to "welcome"
});
In previous versions of the Slack Starter Kit, we included a clever skill which allowed buttons to be treated as typed text if the name of the button was set to "say." In addition to re-emitting the event as a type message, this skill also caused the message in Slack to be updated.
If you use this skill and want to upgrade to the latest version of Botkit, you should replace the skills/interactive_messages.js file in your project with this updated version.
This new version now defines a receive middleware that looks for interactive_message_callback events and performs update to the message. It no longer needs to re-emit the message, as after the middleware completes, the message will pass naturally to any ongoing conversation or hears handler.