Slash Commands: add variadic arguments

[mavolin]

Description

Add the possibility to make arguments variadic, i.e making them useable more than once.
Required variadic arguments need to be specified at least once, optional ones don't need to specified at all.

Why This is Needed

Variadic arguments can be often be used to make the usage of commands easier, and remove the need to execute a command multiple times. A very basic example would be a mute command that takes in multiple users, to mute all of them simultaneously.

While in this example the variadic argument could simply be replaced by multiple calls to mute, there are also cases where variadic arguments act as additional data. For example, a poll create command could take in a variadic poll options argument, which allows the user to specifies multiple possible answers.

Alternatives Considered

There is no real alternative. The only way to use variadic arguments would be to parse the last argument manually.

[daakubotto]

this:tm:

I was wondering the same thing as in my bot you can mute up to 5 people at once but I dont want to do the whole [required] (optional) (optional) (optional) (optional) thing

[mavolin]

Seeing as arguments can be passed in any order, I'm editing this proposal to allow making all arguments variadic.

[msciotti]

Totally valid suggestion. There's a couple ways to probably solve this:

• Allow re-use of specific arguments, like you said
• Introduce array meta-typing for arguments

Both have pros and cons, mostly around UX on both the dev and the user side of things. If you wanted to ban a bunch of users, for example, getting an array of users is probably better than getting 50 user keys. @mavolin can you give me your poll example a bit more written out, like if you had these types, how would you make it?

[Rodentman87]

Just as a bit of a bump to this discussion and also an idea. On the user side it could be displayed as an arg that can be selected like an optional arg (maybe with some sort of prompt that it's repeatable), but each time you select it, it creates a "new instance" of that arg in the UI, but when it's passed to the backend it's passed as an array. This way it's a bit of the best of both worlds. Developers don't need to deal with repeating keys and users don't need to deal with comma/pipe/semicolon separated lists. Plus it would be easier for a user to remove a specific item they entered by selecting and removing that specific "instance" of the arg.

[Stalruth]

That doesn't solve the issue of having to repeat the user key 50 times in Mason's ban example - the tradeoffs are more UI tradeoffs than anything else and the backend will probably follow on in the easiest way possible from that.

[muddyfish]

One example command I have that's variadic is my !react command, which takes a list of emojis and a message and applies all of those reactions in that order to that message as a faster way to add them.

With slash commands, it could be notated as something like /react (message)? (emojis){1,20} regex style. For me in particular, emojis can be one of multiple types; either a raw string or an actual rendered emoji, so it would be helpful if variadic arguments could be of a union type

[mavolin]

@mavolin can you give me your poll example a bit more written out, like if you had these types, how would you make it?

I would imagine the poll command to look something like this /poll create <question: string> <poll options: string...>, where both arguments are required. poll options being variadic, I would expect to able to set a variadic boolean field on the ApplicationCommandOption of poll options to indicate this. This would cause the value received for poll options to be an array of strings instead of just a string.

More generally speaking: The type of the received value of variadic arguments is an array of OptionTypes.

[MattIPv4]

👋 Would like to +1 this and provide another use-case example -- I'd like to rewrite the 1.1.1.1 DNS over Discord bot to use interactions, and the command format I'm aiming for would be /dig <domain: string> [record types: string...], where record types is a set list of DNS record types and the user can select as many as they'd like from it. E.g. /dig cloudflare.com A AAAA

[MattIPv4]

👀 Given the announcement that message content access is being deprecated, just wanted to bump to see if there had been any progress in terms of variadic support?

It'd be nice to be able to have first-class support for arrays rather than simply just porting over custom list parsing from existing message-content-based workflows.

[Andre601]

My bot has several commands that allow to define multiple users through mentions.
While Slashcommands offers a user argument is it imo really limited by only allowing a single user instead of multiple.

Most people that use my bot enjoy the fact that they f.e. can hug or pat more than one user, as it allows them to "Spread happiness and love to multiple people" to quote one user.
So having this limitation is extremely annoying and can, such as in the above case, destroy the fun because now you have to select each user individually in different command instances or the command has to offer multiple user arguments to use...

[GriffinCodes]

My use case is assigning multiple users and labels to a github issue. I can temporarily work around this by adding multiple options named label1, label2, etc.

[Mineinjava]

could also be useful for flags. I.e. /ban user:@user flags:["save-messages", "delete-attachments"]

[i0bs]

Since "editable pills" (as Mason has described them) are going to become a thing in the future for slash commands, what if we had a UX system very much like how doing the image shown below could be viewed, and we're returned back a list example as @Mineinjava said e.g. ["this thing", "another thing"]

[lajawi]

To built upon this, it would be cool if these variadic arguments could have different subnames. In my example, that would be useful for a date input. Then the whole date is together, but still separate:

In this example, the 5 values (integers in this case) could have different separators (as your conceptual image has some separators too). Then, the input could look something like this:

/date date:2024-08-19,14:34

Where -, ,, and : are all just visual separators, and not part of the actual input. The actual output you'd get from this option could be something like this:

{
  "year": 2024,
  "month": 8,
  "date": 19,
  "hour": 14,
  "minute": 34
}

Then, you could use those values separately, just by using the extracted date:

const date = interaction.options.get('date').value;
const year = date.year;

[archubbuck]

Yes, please add this. For my use case, I need to be able to mention multiple roles that I can ping to notify them of a new giveaway.

/giveaway create prize:candy winners:5 days:2 role1:@role1 role2:@role2 role3:@role3
vs.
/giveaway create prize:candy winners:5 days:2 roles:@role1,@role2,@role3,@role4,@role5
or even this would be better:
/giveaway create prize:candy winners:5 days:2 ping:@role1 ping:@role2 ping:@role3 ping:@role4 ping:@role5

[alexmartp]

This would be quite useful, is there any update on this?

[Stalruth]

In the December stage the staff indicated that variadic arguments is a very low priority feature, so don't expect it to ship anytime soon.

[vekat]

In the December stage the staff indicated that variadic arguments is a very low priority feature, so don't expect it to ship anytime soon.

sadly. i think this feature is more important than they seem to think

[somebody1234]

desperately need this for variadic choice parameters - the other options are:

• require users to somehow know the full choice names (not really feasible)
• allowing aliases (very far from ideal implementation wise - especially if you need a lot of aliases (4-5 per choice) to make the command usable)

[somebody1234]

well... i'm currently implementing them via autocomplete - not ideal, and it's only relatively maintainable because of decorators

[Beane2813]

Figured I'd check to see if anyone knows if progress has been made on this feature in the year+ since the last activity. I would love to use it for my /input_mined_resources command so I can have a user input many pairs of .

[SebbyLaw]

I'd love to see this implemented. Would be extremely useful!

[GuilhermeLimaSP]

Almost 3 years and the request continues to be ignored...

[Matezzi777]

I'd love to see this made possible !
I'm trying to make a /report command to report the result of a competitive game for a bot managing tournaments, by giving the users in the game, creating a select dropdown to select the results and save it into a database.

I did it as a prefix command, but would love to make it possible as a slash command too...