File Object Specification

[mpickering]

I'm a bit confused about which fields are always required for all the different objects. For example.. I received a file object with two fields not specified in the API documentation, comments_count and ims.

What does this snippet from the documentation mean?

The name parameter may be null for unnamed files.

Does that mean it will be omitted for unnamed files or it will be the string "null"?

The url property points to a publicly sharable URL directly to the file contents. Only editable-mode files currently have a url_download parameter.

Does this mean that if editable is false then url_download will be omitted or empty ("")

Are any of the thumbnail fields guaranteed to exist?

Can you have a preview and a thumbnail?

In short, it would be greatly appreciated if someone could clarify which of the fields were optional and which were always present.

[paulhammond]

Thanks for asking! I'm looking into this and I'll get back to you soon with some answers and updated docs.

[mccreath]

Thanks for your patience. We're working on updating these docs, and we'll clarify all of these points in a future update.

To your specific questions:

• The name parameter would be included and the value would be the string null.
• If editable is set to false, the usr_download parameter is omitted from the object.
• Certain files might not have thumbnails (like snippets)
• The preview parameter is for text previews (the first few lines of a snippet in the channel, for example) and the thumbnail parameters are for images, so yes: both can exist on a file object.

If you have further questions, feel free to send them to feedback@slack.com. We're going to continue monitoring the issues here, but response time will generally be faster at that email address.