Acknowledging interactions

When an interaction event is received from the gateway, the library is able to acknowledge them automatically. This allows to simplify your code a lot, as you can directly use createFollowup() or editReply() without worrying about choosing between reply(), edit(), deferReply() or deferEdit() first. If you have a specific use case that requires you to take full control over the acknowledgment process, the library gets you covered by offering a way to disable automatic acknowledgment on a per-command basis.

Modifying the default acknowledgment behavior

This was partially covered in the Configuration page, the default behavior can be set via the default_ack_mode field of config.json if you are using the Botrino framework, or via InteractionConfig.Builder#defaultACKMode(String) when building the configuration manually. Here's a table describing the possible values and their behavior:

value	behavior
default	Equivalent to defer.
defer	Automatically calls deferReply() (for commands) or deferEdit() (for components).
defer_ephemeral	Automatically calls deferReply().withEphemeral(true) (for commands) or deferEdit().withEphemeral(true) (for components).
none	Does not call any acknowledgment method.

Overriding the acknowledgment mode on a per-command basis

Let's say you have defer as default behavior in your config, and you want to make a command that replies exclusively with ephemeral messages. There would be no way to achieve this without overriding the acknowledgment behavior for this specific command so that it can be ephemeral. This is as simple as adding an @Acknowledge annotation with the desired mode as value:

package testbot1;

import botrino.interaction.annotation.Acknowledge;
import botrino.interaction.annotation.ChatInputCommand;
import botrino.interaction.listener.ChatInputInteractionListener;
import botrino.interaction.context.ChatInputInteractionContext;
import org.reactivestreams.Publisher;

@Acknowledge(Acknowledge.Mode.DEFER_EPHEMERAL)
@ChatInputCommand(name = "ping", description = "Pings the bot to check if it is alive.")
public final class PingCommand implements ChatInputInteractionListener {

    @Override
    public Publisher<?> run(ChatInputInteractionContext ctx) {
        return ctx.event().createFollowup("Pong!").withEphemeral(true);
    }
}

Since this is a very simple command, you could even completely disable automatic acknowledgment and use reply() instead of createFollowup():

package testbot1;

import botrino.interaction.annotation.Acknowledge;
import botrino.interaction.annotation.ChatInputCommand;
import botrino.interaction.listener.ChatInputInteractionListener;
import botrino.interaction.context.ChatInputInteractionContext;
import org.reactivestreams.Publisher;

@Acknowledge(Acknowledge.Mode.NONE)
@ChatInputCommand(name = "ping", description = "Pings the bot to check if it is alive.")
public final class PingCommand implements ChatInputInteractionListener {

    @Override
    public Publisher<?> run(ChatInputInteractionContext ctx) {
        return ctx.event().reply("Pong!").withEphemeral(true);
    }
}

warning

If your command is made of subcommands or subcommand groups, the @Acknowledge annotation must be used on the listener implementation class of individual subcommands; putting it on the parent class alongside @ChatInputCommand will have no effect.