Adding Command Options

commands --help

You now have a bot that uses slash commands, what's next? Command options, of course! They make your commands dynamic and are a crucial part of most commands. And of course, they're easy-as-pie to work with, thanks to the resultBuilder syntax used by DiscordKit.

What are resultBuilders?

If you've used SwiftUI or even DiscordKit, you've already used them! They allow the special syntax you can use to create commands! It's special syntax that allows building multiple "blocks" into a "stack" (i.e. array), such as creating SwiftUI views or registering your bot's commands! In this page, we'll be further using this syntax to register, you guessed it, command options.

Let's try adding options to the /hello command we previously added. A name option would be really handy, so we could give the user personalised hello messages for increased human-ness.

To do so, we can add option children blocks to the /hello command we defined earlier, similar to how you'd add children to a SwiftUI view:

NewAppCommand("hello", description: "Get a nice hello message") {
    StringOption("name", description: "Your beautiful name")
}  { interaction in
    print("Received hello interaction!")
    // Reply with a random hello message
    try? await interaction.reply(HELLO_MESSAGES.randomElement()!)
}

Then, we'd need to handle the value of the name option, if one is given. As we did not specify that our option is required, it's optional by default. The interaction struct passed to your handler contains the optionValue(of:) method that allows easy retrieval of option values. Let's modify the handler to send back a personalised hello message if a name was specified, otherwise just return a random hello message as usual.

    ...
} handler: { interaction in
    print("Received hello interaction!")
    if let name: String = interaction.optionValue(of: "name") {
        try? await interaction.reply("Hello \(name), hope you're having a wonderful day!")
    } else {
        // Reply with a random hello message
        try? await interaction.reply(HELLO_MESSAGES.randomElement()!)
    }
}

Here, we're using an optional binding to conditionally unwrap and run a block of code if the name option isn't nil (which means it was specified by the user). The else clause will be run if the value of the option is nil.

Give the command a go - with just a few lines, you've added and handled your bot's first command option! How cool is that?

bbbbb <insert realistic surname>

GitHub - SwiftcordApp/DiscordKitGettingStarted at adding-command-optionsGitHub

That didn't work? Check out the code in this branch for a helping hand!