What are Chat and Slack notifications?
Google Chat and Slack are different communication apps that let you message and communicate with other coworkers and users to share information in real-time.
You can send data from Tables to create a message in a Google Chat room or Slack channel, which then can notify people in those channels of relevant information. This can be done using our Webhook Bot Action to send data to other apps that have webhook support.
Example use cases:
- When the intake form is submitted and creates a new row, notify a Chat room that it needs to be triaged.
- When a bug has been marked as urgent, send a notification to the #escalation Slack channel.
Webhook setup
Make sure you understand how Webhooks work, and when configuring your webhook bot action, you can use the following instructions to make sure you get the webhook listener setup on the other app properly, and to send the right data along.
You can use variables to include data from the rows in your table as well.
See Google’s article on how to setup an incoming webhook to create a webhook URL for the chat room. Once you have the webhook URL, in Tables, configure your bot:
- URL: <paste the webhook URL from Google Chat>
- Webhook format: POST with JSON
- Request parameters:
|
Parameter Name |
Parameter Value |
|---|---|
|
text (note: THIS IS CASE SENSITIVE) |
Hello {{Assignee}}, please review this ticket. You can even @mention individuals or all users in the room using some of these special message format options. |
See Slack’s help article on webhooks for instructions on how to create the webhook URL for a specific Slack channel. Once you have the webhook URL, then in Tables, configure your bot:
- URL: <paste the webhook URL from Slack>
- Webhook format: POST with JSON
- Request parameters: (see here for more options for rich content)
|
Parameter Name |
Parameter Value |
|---|---|
|
text (note: THIS IS CASE SENSITIVE) |
Hello {{Assignee}}, please review this ticket: [[record_url]]. |
Debugging issues
The tricky part with setting up webhooks is knowing the format in which the receiving app wants the data. You can use a site like Webhook Tester to create a fake webhook URL that you can test to see if data is being passed through correctly.