My recent blog post on figuring out some things for a Slack integration was related to the Amadeus Wins System which we built for employees to recognize other employees.
What we added to the Wins System was to publish our wins via a bot to our general Slack channel, though as the blog points out, you can't use the giphy integration when you do so.
The response has been very positive to this - partly because the employees who get recognized are glad to have the added visibility to their exploits and successes, but also for a somewhat unexpected reason.
Because Amadeus has a lot of clients, not everyone knows what everyone else is working on. When a win is published, it gives other team members an awareness that so-and-so was working on X. So, the rest of the employees have a greater visibility to what others are working on - which they really like, simply so that they are more aware of what goes on in other parts of the building.
It's always great to get that type of unexpected benefit.
The Wins System is only an internal tool, for now, but it is something that the team really appreciates, and which we hope to add some additional functionality to in the future.
By forever, I mean it took me almost an hour. That says something about our access to information and my own expectations, but that's another blog post entirely.
The trouble happened because of the nature of my question - which the StackOverflow post does a good job of explaining - I'm trying to call one integration from another. This leads to a semantic overlap of the parts question I'm trying to ask.
I like to envision this as the question collapsing on itself, inside of Google, but I probably don't really understand that as well as I think I do, and I did just watch Tron recently.
Plus many variations of 'call a slash command from web hook on Slack' leads me to Slack's own documentation where they don't answer this question (as of this writing 3/1/2016).
In the end the answer is obvious - you can't call one integration from another. This prevents a lot of attacks or spamming that could probably happen if you had a wide open gateway to push data through Slack.
How did I find it in the end? Brute force querying google until I found a result that didn't look like all the other slash command/web hook posts and documentation that are out there.
Final Google query - 'pass giphy to slack api' which removes the confusion by specifically naming the thing I'm trying to do - 'giphy' - instead of just asking more generally about slash commands.
It was the 4th result.
I have to teach my kids all this some day. Maybe they will just grow up knowing how to do it.
Jonathan Fries on .