What’s New in slackr 2.1.0

R
Author

Matt Kaye

Published

February 7, 2021

Introduction

slackr 2.1.0+ is live! There are a whole bunch of exciting changes that we (mostly Andrie de Vries and I) have made to improve the package a bunch.

Changes

Here are some of the things that are new in slackr 2.1.0+. For more info on the package, check out the Github repo and the pkgdown site.

Ease of Use Improvements

  • We’ve dramatically improved error messaging, so long gone are the days of errors like No 'id' column found in 'x'! Now, error messages should be far more helpful, with some hints about what might be going wrong.
  • We’ve updated the package documentation significantly, so now there’s a far more informative README, some vignettes, and a pkgdown site.
  • We’ve more clearly described the different use cases for slackr, in order to better help users set up slackr in a way that makes sense for them.

New Features

  • We’ve fixed a bunch of bugs that were preventing things like icon_emoji and username from working, so those are fixed now!
  • We’ve brought back some old functions that were removed in slackr 2.0.0: slackr_history() and slackr_delete(). See the docs for descriptions of what these functions can do.

Back-End Changes

We’ve made a ton of changes for how slackr interacts with the Slack API:

  • We now allow paging, which is especially helpful when you have a workspace of more than 1000 channels.
  • We cache requests to get lists of channels and users so that we don’t need to repeat common API calls. This speeds up calls to slackr_***() and limits how often you need to actually hit the API.
  • We’ve gotten rid of a really nasty implementation of channel caching (writing a local cache to the disk) in favor of the method described above.
  • We’ve factored out API calls into a separate function, which makes the package easier to understand and test.
  • Speaking of testing, we’ve implemented a whole bunch of unit tests, and will be working on more.

Deprecations

  • We’ve deprecated a bunch of camel case functions in favor of their snake case counterparts for simplicity. Don’t worry! These are soft-deprecated for now. They won’t go away fully until a future version of slackr
  • We’ve deprecated text_slackr in favor of slackr_msg, since they do basically the same thing.