Natively Connect to Slack Data in PHP

Drop the CData ODBC Driver for Slack into your LAMP or WAMP stack to build Slack-connected Web applications. This article shows how to use PHP's ODBC built-in functions to connect to Slack data, execute queries, and output the results.

Configure a DSN

If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.

Slack uses the OAuth authentication standard. To authenticate using OAuth, you will need to create an app to obtain the OAuthClientId, OAuthClientSecret, and CallbackURL connection properties. See the Getting Started section of the help documentation for an authentication guide.

Establish a Connection

Open the connection to Slack by calling the odbc_connect or odbc_pconnect methods. To close connections, use odbc_close or odbc_close_all.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Slack Source","user","password");

Connections opened with odbc_connect are closed when the script ends. Connections opened with the odbc_pconnect method are still open after the script ends. This enables other scripts to share that connection when they connect with the same credentials. By sharing connections among your scripts, you can save system resources, and queries execute faster.

$conn = odbc_pconnect("CData ODBC Slack Source","user","password"); ... odbc_close($conn); //persistent connection must be closed explicitly

Create Prepared Statements

Create prepared statements and parameterized queries with the odbc_prepare function.

$query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Channels WHERE IsPublic = ?");

Execute Queries

Execute prepared statements with odbc_execute.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Slack Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Channels WHERE IsPublic = ?"); $success = odbc_execute($query, array('True'));

Execute nonparameterized queries with odbc_exec.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Slack Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Id, Name FROM Channels");

Process Results

Access a row in the result set as an array with the odbc_fetch_array function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Slack data Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_exec($conn, "SELECT Id, Name FROM Channels"); while($row = odbc_fetch_array($query)){ echo $row["Id"] . "\n"; }

Display the result set in an HTML table with the odbc_result_all function.

$conn = odbc_connect("CData ODBC Slack data Source","user","password"); $query = odbc_prepare($conn, "SELECT * FROM Channels WHERE IsPublic = ?"); $success = odbc_execute($query, array('True')); if($success) odbc_result_all($query);

More Example Queries

You will find complete information on the driver's supported SQL in the help documentation. The code examples above are Slack-specific adaptations of the PHP community documentation for all ODBC functions.