Slack Message Dynamic Automations - Reply to Specific Chat

You can't do that from Airtable native integration with slack. You would need to use a tool like Make.com

The Field channel/user is to point out the channel you are sending the message to. 

If you want to reply in a message you can use a make.com module that you can write a reply and in the settings you use the message ID for the message you want to reply to.

Cheers!

Yes, building upon ​@felipe-saucedo’s advice above, you’ll typically want to do that using Make’s Slack integrations and Make’s Airtable integrations.

You can follow my instructions on how to set this up in that other thread.

However, since you said that your company may not allow external integrations such as Make, you can also write your own custom JavaScript programming code to enable Airtable to communicate with Slack.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

As mentioned, Make is a no go per the company’s policies. If someone has relevant information to the original request, it will be appreciated.

I can use a channel ID (CID) and I can use a user ID so it’s curious that it doesn’t allow the thread time stamp (thread_ts) to reply to a channel thread per Slack’s API.

As I previously mentioned in my post above, your only option would be to write custom JavaScript code to integrate Airtable with Slack.

I don’t know JavaScript, but maybe somebody else will be able to help you out below. You might even be able to turn to ChatGPT to help write this sort of code.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

I don't think a JavaScript would do it as to reply on a message there should be an API request. 

Yes, it would work perfectly fine, because scripts can make API calls to external apps.

And this is natively built into Airtable, because you can run scripts from Airtable’s automations.

When the first Slack message is created from Airtable, it needs a JavaScript to make the first API call to Slack to create the message.

Then, Slack would return the thread ID to the script, which the script would store in the Airtable record.

Future replies would use JavaScript to make another API call to reply to the original message.

It would be relatively quick & easy to setup. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

Does this look right?  If so, I’ve set it up here for you to check out

Airtable’s Slack action doesn’t expose thread_ts, so we’re just using a Run a Script action to send the message, then log the thread_ts value after that

‘Send reply’ then triggers another automation that’ll use the thread_ts value to send the next message

Slack’s API is pretty painless so with this base as a reference and a bit of googling you’ll be fine.  Hit me up if you encounter any issues and I’ll do what I can to help!