Watcher: Make message.text in slack messages optional

[elasticmachine]

Original comment by @spinscale:

From: https://discuss.elastic.co/t/make-message-text-not-required-for-slack-action/120939

The Slack action currently requires message.text to be present, though slack will gladly require a message without it, as a message can have an attachment which contains the text to be displayed. The current requirement for message.text means a message with attachment needs both message.text and message.attachments.text, causing the message displayed in Slack to look slightly disjointed. Would be excellent to remove this requirement.

[albendz]

Let me know if anyone is working on this and if not, I can grab it.

I'm new to this project so it will take me a little extra time to get to PR.

[spinscale]

there is currently noone working on this, working on a PR is much appreciated!

[albendz]

Simplistic scan over the code solution:

• remove final modifier on message and attachments, allowing them to be null
• rearrange code to provide multiple constructors to allow for variable number of parameters
• Support setters for message and attachments in case someone changes their mind later (Actual reason: provide setters for mutable fields that are optional within the constructor)

Based on the SlackAccount.java code, a null message and/or null Attachements is tolerated via null checks.

[albendz]

I am working on testing the solution above but I'm hitting so many dependency issues building the project in IntelliJ that I'm not making a lot of progress. I couldn't find a help page for this. Any pointers?

[tvernum]

@albendz You should be able to use the gradle integration in IntelliJ to get everything working.

Run ./gradlew idea from the root of the elasticsearch/ project, and then import it into IntelliJ as a gradle project, using gradle wrapper.

IntelliJ can take some time to builds its caches and refresh indices, etc but that should give you a working project. If you run into specific errors, please let us know.

[albendz]

@tvernum Extremely obvious in retrospect. Thanks for the reminder.

[albendz]

Is there a better place to ask setup questions than on this issue? I'm now working on installing Java 9 alongside Java 10 against Oracle recommendation due to the build errors I'm getting.

[tvernum]

We have a forum where you can ask questions.
Feel free to ping me @TimV there if you want to draw attention to your post (on this topic, not just any old post 😃).

[albendz]

Thanks Tim, I've created this thread: https://discuss.elastic.co/t/java-9-dependency/135214

Also, if you could check my earlier comments on this regarding my proposed solution, I would appreciate the verification of my approach.