How to make a mention to a user in a slack message from Workflow Builder when the username/ID comes from a variable

Question

I'm trying to make a workflow for my slack team where I have these steps (with workflow builder):

• Starts when user clicks on the shortcut in a channel
• Opens a form - we ask many questions, one question has multiple fixed choices
• Select row from Google Sheets - depending on the answer, we select a row
• Send a message to a slack channel - Use the value from another column of the same row that contains a slack memberID (or username) to mention the person on the message

I expected the slack message on the channel to have @userHere as a mention (triggering the notifications). However, the message was sent on the channel with @userHere as a plain string i.e. not clickable and it does not trigger a notification.

What I tried:

what I put in the send message step	what is saved in the sheet
@variable	"user.name"
@variable	"U123213"
variable	"@user.name"
variable	"@U123213"
{{variable}}	@user.name

among other attempts, but I never get the mention.

Knorr

did you find any workaround? – Pushy

Not yet... it seems something simple.. but i can't find a workarount... – Knorr

I am looking for the exact same solution. Have you ever find the solution? Any workaround you did? – Animate

I think it is still not working - forums.slackcommunity.com/s/question/0D53a000094Qx0uCAC/… They suggested using userId, not name, like <@USER_GROUP_ID> but this is not working for me. Was trying to do that for group <!subteam^user_group_id> and it shows in form perfectly fine, but then it looks like Slack converts it to plain text :/ Don't have any clue how to do that. – Rewrite

Answer 1

If using webhooks, you can add a "Slack user email" variable in the workflow and then add that variable to the "Message text" with Mention (default) option selected.

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Webhook settings

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Send a message settings

Koziol

Answer 2

when posting from the SLACK API I believe the correct code for an @ is to wrap it in angled brackets

<@user_id>

So in the case where you input was of the form

{{variable}}

Then it should translate the variable appropriately.

Outreach

I just get {{<@U0452BNJR7V>}} as plain text... – Knorr