How is ChatPostMessageRequest.linkNames serialized?

[Spencer857]

I want to send a formatted message via chat.postMessage endpoint. My text is properly escaped and I don't want Slack to guess any escaping. Slack formatting guide (https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting#automatic-parsing__disabling-automatic-parsing) says:

If you want to disable automatic parsing, you have a couple of options depending on the type of text:
...

• For the top-level text field, or text in secondary message attachments, as long as you exclude the link_names argument when publishing, this will be disabled by default.

...

So I'm looking for an option to exclude the link_names argument. I see that there's ChatPostMessageRequest.linkNames field of type boolean. Will setting it to false exclude the link_names argument? It's a bit confusing because I would rather expect some Boolean or Integer field where I had to assing it to null.

[Spencer857]

I've found relevant code fragment here https://github.com/slackapi/java-slack-sdk/blob/main/slack-api-client/src/main/java/com/slack/api/methods/RequestFormBuilder.java#L1516

// ...
setIfNotNull("link_names", req.isLinkNames(), form);
// ...

and it's lacking this important functionality. It serializes true to 1 and false to 0. But there's no possibility of specifying no value because type is boolean but should be Boolean.

[WilliamBergamin]

Hi @Spencer857 thanks for writing in 💯

Setting link_names to false should prevent slack from pattern matching link names in your message, are you experiencing a different behavior?

Also from this doc it seems like link_names no longer supports linking individual users

Find and link user groups. No longer supports linking individual users; use syntax shown in Mentioning Users instead.

Alternatively you could try to post your message as a rich_text_preformatted block element, this should prevent slack from guessing any escaping 🤔

[Spencer857]

Am I right that link_names is false by default in Bolt for Java?

Alternatively you could try to post your message as a rich_text_preformatted block element

I cannot use blocks. It needs to be text because our bot is sending messages on a user's behalf, and this message must be editable by them.