Auto reconnecting Margiebot to Slack

MargieBot is a simple to use .Net framework for making your own bots for Slack. To start up a bot and connect it to Slack, all it takes is:

Bot myBot = new Bot();
myBot.Connect("<your bot's slack API token>");

This makes the happy path work very well, but out of the box this will not handle dropped connections or attempting to reconnect to the server - so if the connection is interrupted for any reason, you bot will no longer try to connect to Slack.

Fortunately MargieBot offers an extensibility point that we can use to add this functionality in.

MargieBot emits a ConnectionStatusChanged event when the bot connects or disconnects from Slack. it also exposes a public property called IsConnected.

We can wire up an event handler to the ConnectionStatusChanged event like so:

_bot = new Bot();
_bot.ConnectionStatusChanged += ConnectToSlackIfDisconnected;

Our event handler can then try to establish a connection to Slack and retry until it is able to do so.

We can also re-ue this code when making the initial connection to Slack. Instead of calling

_bot.Connect("<Slack API Token>") // do not do this anymore

you can call the event handler explicitly with:

ConnectToSlackIfDisconnected(false); // do this instead!