Skip to main content

Building an App for Removing Multiple Slack's Files

You're a developer. What do you do in your spare time? One of my most excited task for sharpening my skills is starting build a pet project.

Motivation

Slack is cool! It's free. It supports for team collaboration very well.

However, my team only has storage limits due to a free account. We got a warning message as below:
Your file was uploaded — it’s safe and sound in Slack. Unfortunately your team doesn’t have any storage space left. To get more space, you can upgrade to a paid account or delete some of your older files.
Since my team plan of upgrading to a paid account is still up in the air, I intended to go with "deleting some of our older files" first. (But we will, Slack. You are great!)

Play Around

I got started by googling keyword "remove slack files". Here it is:
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/218159688-Delete-shared-files

Uh huh! But I only could delete one file at a time.
We're afraid it's not possible to bulk delete files. We know that your business data is important to you — that's why we offer API methods to help you manage them.
How about removing the multiple files? Yeah! Slack is very cool again. They provide an API that I am able to bulk delete files:
https://api.slack.com/methods#files

Accordingly, I'm able to firstly call method "files.list" to obtain all files then I just need to loop the list to remove each file with method "file.delete".

Taking a look to the Slack API, I saw what I need to prepare is a "token" for building a very simple application.

In order to obtain a token, I just need to follow the following article. ;)
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/215770388-Create-and-regenerate-API-tokens

Let's go! I have made a test method "files.list" with Postman. Woo hoo! It worked.

Get Down To It

Now, I easily could build a REST client app to achieve this goal. With Java, I used Jersey as REST client API. The following are my steps:

  1. Setup environment: Eclipse, Git, JDK, Maven, Tomcat.
  2. Build a JSF Maven-based app and run on Tomcat 8
  3. Write a service to call the methods needed "files.list" and "files.delete"
  4. Refactor and put to Github. ;)


This is just my first draft, I'm still on my way to improve it. Anybody who wants to join me, you're are very welcome. ;)

The source code is here: https://github.com/vnnvanhuong/slack_bulk_files_remover
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monday vhandit #1

This is the first post in a series of articles called "Monday vhandit". You can go to the original post by clicking on each head title. Character encodings: essential concepts This article points out why Unicode matters and differentiates among concepts: character sets, coded character set (unit is code points), and character encoding. Explained from First Principles: the Internet The very structural and well-explained article contains almost concepts of the Internet. I really appreciated the author's effort put on that post. Dev Community - DevDojo I just joined this community. DevDojo is really a developer-oriented platform. It is very nice, easy, fast, and sufficient to write (Markdown supported) and search for a post. The best of it, you also have a personal blog for your posts at "<your_username>.devdojo.com". My username is vnnvanhuong Everything you need to know about HTTP security headers A good collection of HTTP security-related headers. Moreover...
Post a Comment
Read more

Projects Ownership

Developers should be informed transparently about the next things that they are going to do since it impacts their mentality as well as their accountabilities. A view of Vung Tau beach First thing first, the Product Owner plays a very important role in understanding the business of the projects clearly and planning the User Stories for Development Teams. For Development Teams, we have two roles related to a project including Owner and Maintainer. The following are the definition and responsibilities for each role: Project Owner The Owner is normally assigned to the team that created the project at the beginning. It is known as the long-term project of the team. Therefore, the members of the Owner have almost knowledge of the projects including the history (i.e decisions made), business logic, and technologies used.  - Maintain a good system design (code) of the projects. Therefore, they are mandatory to review code (pull requests) from other teams. - Maintain the related documents ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Monday vhandit #2

  Introduction to OpenLDAP directory service "A directory is a specialized database specially designed for searching and browsing, in addition to supporting basic lookup and update functions" A directory service can be local, providing a restricted context; or global, providing service to a much broader context. Curlie is a good example of a directory service. LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is a protocol for accessing directory services , specifically X.500-based directory services. OpenLDAP is an open-source implementation of LDAP. Writing system software: code comments I have read Clean Code (by Uncle Bob) and I thought that I should void comments since the code it explains its implementation itself. That is right but not always true. In this post, the author categorized the comments into 9 types. Only "trivial comments" and "backup comments" are the ones that should be avoided. I myself agree with "writing good comments is harder tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tip for resolving the compile errors when importing a Maven project in Eclipse

Sometimes, I import a existing Maven project into Eclipse and I get some compile errors related to "pom.xml", "facet version of Web", and  so on. It was really frustrating me because I even cleaned, built and updated the project many times but the errors still occurred. I accidentally found the following steps to resolve this issue but honestly I still don't know why. Step 1 : Delete the project that met the compile errors in Eclipse, but don't delete it on disk. Step 2 : Open the project (by Windows Explorer if you use Windows) and remove  file/folder ".classpath", ".settings" and ".project" . Step 3 : Import the project back into Eclipse. ---^0^--- Maven is a build automation tool used primarily for Java projects. Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE).
Post a Comment
Read more