web-api: type-safe response properties access

[huzaifahj]

What type of issue is this? (place an x in one of the [ ])

• [x] bug

Requirements (place an x in each of the [ ])

• [x] I've read and understood the Contributing guidelines and have done my best effort to follow them.
• [x] I've read and agree to the Code of Conduct.
• [x] I've searched for any related issues and avoided creating a duplicate issue.

---

Bug Report

const slackUser = await app.client.users.info({
    user: installation.user.id,
})

slackUser.user.name // Object `user` is possibly 'undefined'.

If there was an error here, the function would throw an error and we could catch it somewhere else. It's confusing me and should be a bug that we can't safely access properties after a function is called with no errors.

Should we be having to use if {} else {} to safely access these properties?

Reproducible in:

package version: "@slack/bolt": "^3.12.2",

[seratch]

Hi @huzaifahj, thanks for asking the question!

Indeed, some of the properties are not actually optional, but this has been a limitation of the package due to several factors such as the complexity of Slack response data patterns, lack of resources in our SDK maintenance team, and so on.

In TS code, you can safely access the property in the following way:

slackUser.user?.name!;

I hope this was helpful to you.

[huzaifahj]

Thanks @seratch for confirming my suspicions.

I am aware of the ways to bypass the type checking in the way you suggested, but this requires external knowledge that the properties will be included in the response.

I would like to leave this issue open and change it to a feature improvement rather than a bug so that the team can track this issue, if that's okay?

[seratch]

@huzaifahj

I would like to leave this issue open and change it to a feature improvement rather than a bug so that the team can track this issue, if that's okay?

This is fine, but perhaps we won't be able to put efforts on the improvement in the short term (meaning, even if it happens, it can be longer than a few months for sure. And, honestly, it'll be possibly years or never).

[github-actions[bot]]

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