Plumber and the Slack API

plumber
Note

See Slack and Plumber on R Views for a discussion of this code.

This asset shows how plumber can be used to build a Slack slash command. The API is built on top of a simulated customer dataset that contains details about customer call history. The slash command provides access to customer status report as well as customer success rep reports directly from within Slack. The goal of this integration is to highlight the strengths of plumber and how it can be used to reliably and securely integrate R with other products and services.

Screenshot of Slack showing the customer data slash command in use.

Using

Once you have created the slack app and the slash command as described in Getting Started, you can access the API from within the slack interface.

gif of the slash command in use in the Slack application.

Commands

/cs help
/cs status <customer_id>
/cs rep <rep_name>
/cs region <region_name>

Examples

Try the following examples using the /cs command with your slackbot.

/cs status 10

Screenshot of Slack showing result of the /cs command.

/cs rep Lovey Torp MD

Screenshot of Slack showing result of the /cs command.

`/cs region east

Screenshot of Slack showing result of the /cs command.

Simulated data

The API pulls data from a simulated customer dataset using the wakefield package and the charlatan package. You can use the following levels for rep, region, and id.

Rep Region ID
Lovey Torp MD North 1
Marla Nitzsche South 2
Miss Halle Heidenreich DVM East 3
Miss Jayne Sanford West 4
Ms. Arely Strosin PhD
Sannie Schuppe DDS 100

Details

Instead of registering a different command for each endpoint, the first argument provided to the slash command is the endpoint while the subsequent argument(s) (if necessary) provide additional data to be passed to the specified endpoint. This way, a single slash command serves multiple endpoints without polluting the slash command namespace.

To access a customer status report, enter /cs status <id> in Slack, where id is a valid customer ID from the simulated data. The customer status report includes the customer name, total calls, date of birth, and a plot call totals for the last 20 weeks. The color of the message is an indication of customer health. Green indicates the customer has no issues while red indicates the customer has a high volume of calls, indicating a potential problem.

Help for all available commands can be accessed by entering /cs help or simply /cs into Slack.

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