Interactions Howto¶
Interactions such as slash commands and buttons are some sexy lil additions to Discord. As such, you’ll probably want to use them. Fortunately, VoxelBotUtils makes this pretty easy. Aside from the howto, there’s a full API reference on the main API reference page.
Responding to an Interaction¶
Interactions need to be responded to, or it shows as “this interaction has failed” in the Discord UI. The Discord API supports a few ways of responding:
deferan interaction, which gives a “processing” message, and respond later.defer_updatean interaction, which doesn’t give a processing message, and respond later. This is only available on components.respondto an interaction, and receive nodiscord.Messageobject back.
Using the respond() method will send a type 4 response in the backend, which means that you’re unable to receive a message object back from the API, but it does allow you to give responses without showing the loading symbol - a use case for this could be an ephemeral message saying “you can’t use this button” or suchlike.
Slash Commands¶
One of the inbuilt cogs in VBU allows you to automatically add all public commands (anything that’s not a meta command, not an owner only command, and has its add_slash_command attribute set to True - as is the default) as slash commands.
To [attempt to] add all of your commands as slash commands, run the !addslashcommands command in your code, and the bot will attempt to convert all of your arguments and bulk-add the commands to Discord. If this conversion fails, you’ll be given a straight traceback of the error instead of anything interpreted, so you can see exactly where the issue stems from.
Most issues stem from using discord.ext.commands.Greedy, misordering your optional arguments (they must appear at the end), using even slightly complex group commands, and using converters that don’t stem from a commonly converted types (though in this instance you can add a SLASH_COMMAND_ARG_TYPE attribute being an instance of voxelbotutils.ApplicationCommandOptionType to your converter for the bot to use).
When adding arguments to a command, you’re able to give descriptions to those arguments using voxelbotutils.Command.argument_descriptions.
Components¶
Components are interactive additions to messages that you’re able to send.
All interactions need to be placed into a MessageComponents object, and that needs to be populated with :class:`ActionRow`s before finally allowing the components you actually want to send.
components = voxelbotutils.MessageComponents(
voxelbotutils.ActionRow(
voxelbotutils.Button("Finally")
)
)
Buttons¶
Using buttons has been made pretty simple. First, you send your button to the user.
button1 = voxelbotutils.Button("Button 1")
button2 = voxelbotutils.Button("Button 2")
components = voxelbotutils.MessageComponents(
voxelbotutils.ActionRow(button1, button2)
)
m = await channel.send("Text is required when sending buttons, unfortunately.", components=components)
Then for all button types other than ButtonStyle.LINK, you can get notified when a user clicks on your button. This is dispatched as a component_interaction event.
payload = await bot.wait_for("component_interaction", check=lambda p: p.message.id == 123123123123)
await payload.defer()
After that, you can work out which of your buttons the user clicked on and take action based on that, sending back to the button payload so as to complete the interaction.
clicked_button = p.component
if clicked_button == button1:
await p.send("You clicked on button 1!", ephemeral=True)
elif clicked_button == button2:
await p.send("You clicked on button 2!", ephemeral=True)