Unable to disable emojis in plain text blocks

[christeredvartsen]

What happened

Creating a TextBlockObject with the Emoji field set to false does not disable rendering of emojis in that text block.

The reason this happens is because of the omitempty JSON-tag:

type TextBlockObject struct {
	Type     string `json:"type"`
	Text     string `json:"text"`
	Emoji    bool   `json:"emoji,omitempty"` // <-- this one
	Verbatim bool   `json:"verbatim,omitempty"`
}

This causes the field to be removed from the payload when encoded to JSON (if the field is false) as seen in this snippet: https://go.dev/play/p/63tqgJJ6Nnt.

The required JSON payload for creating a plain text object without support for emojis is:

{
	"type": "section",
	"text": {
		"type": "plain_text",
		"text": ":+1:",
		"emoji": false
	}
}

This is likely an issue for some other fields with the omitempty tag as well, where you explicitly need to set a value to false in the JSON payload for the Slack API.

Expected behavior

Creating a TextBlockObject with the Emoji field set to false should disable rendering of emojis in that text block.

Steps to reproduce

emoji, verbatim := false, false
slack.New("some token").PostMessage(
	"channel ID",
	slack.MsgOptionBlocks(
		slack.NewSectionBlock(
			slack.NewTextBlockObject("plain_text", ":+1:", emoji, verbatim), 
			nil, 
			nil,
		),
	),
)

Versions

• Go: go version go1.23.1 linux/amd64
• slack-go/slack: v0.14.0

[Manjish]

How about we change the type of emoji to bool pointer ? This will remove the field if a nil value is passed and will retain the false value as well 🤔

[calebmckay]

I can probably look at fixing this, since it's the same sort of change as #1341. Might also do a deep dive to see if there's any other omitempty fields that could be turned to pointers.