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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Coders are NERDS | Learning English with Podcast

Let's learn three English vocabulary words based on real-life context through a humorous video about the life of software coders, especially at big tech companies when they work from home. Credit to Joma Tech. 🤓

Junit - Test fails on French or German string assertion

In my previous post about building a regex to check a text without special characters but allow German and French . I met a problem that the unit test works fine on my machine using Eclipse, but it was fail when running on Jenkins' build job. Here is my test: @Test public void shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters(){ String source = "ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ"; assertFalse(SpecialCharactersUtils.isExistSpecialCharater(source)); } Production code: public static boolean isExistNotAllowedCharacters(String source){ Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z_0-9_ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ]*$"); Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(source); return !matcher.matches(); } The result likes the following: Failed tests: SpecialCharactersUtilsTest.shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters:32 null A guy from stackoverflow.com says: "This is probably due to the default encoding used for your Java source files. The ö in the string literal in the J...

The HelloWorld example of JSF 2.2 with Myfaces

I just did by myself create a very simple app "HelloWorld" of JSF 2.2 with a concrete implementation Myfaces that we can use it later on for our further JSF trying out. I attached the source code link at the end part. Just follow these steps below: 1. Create a Maven project in Eclipse (Kepler) with a simple Java web application archetype "maven-archetype-webapp". Maven should be the best choice for managing the dependencies , so far. JSF is a web framework that is the reason why I chose the mentioned archetype for my example. 2. Import dependencies for JSF implementation - Myfaces (v2.2.10) into file pom.xml . The following code that is easy to find from  http://mvnrepository.com/  with key words "myfaces". <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.myfaces.core</groupId> <artifactId>myfaces-api</artifactId> <version>2.2.10</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.myfaces.core<...

Git Feature Branch Workflow

Motivator It's important for a team to have an agreement on how the changes of source code should be applied. According to projects and teams size, we will define a workflow or select one from recommended workflows ; the "Feature Branch Workflow" is a candidate. What is it? - One branch "master" for main codebase - Several separated branches for features development Why should we care? - Be super simple and allow each developer works on a particular feature. - A stable codebase (master) benefits for continuous integration (CI) environment - Leverage "Pull request" for Code review How it works? A lifecyle of a feature branch (usually created by a story) 1. Creator creates a new branch from a story.  For example: "ABC-1-setup-projects" 2. Creator checkouts the created branch and works on the branch (commits, pushes) 3. Creator has done the feature, he uses "pull request" to merge his branch into branch "master...

Gzip upload on browsers

Today, I faced a problem that I could not upload my archive file with gzip format on Firefox, even it worked on Chrome. I was using macOS. My application had a setting to whitelist accepted files. I’ve already added "application/gzip" to that list. "It’s strange!", I thought. I finally figured out that my uploaded file's type actually was "application/x-gzip" on Firefox. I also asked my colleagues to check their uploaded files on Window and Ubuntu. Hmm… they were totally different! It was "application/x-compressed" on Window, and was "application/x-compressed-tar" on Ubuntu. In fact, gzip is already standardized by IANA. There is a note in RFC-6713 as below: "Some applications have informally used media types such as application/gzip-compressed, application/gzipped, application/x-gunzip, application/x-gzip, application/x-gzip-compressed, and gzip/document to describe data compressed with gzip. The media types defin...