Support removing reactions

[oxc]

I would like to be able to remove reactions from a comment that I previously added.

Consider for example the following use case:
I have a long running job that results in a comment to PR.
When a new change is pushed, I want to indicate that I will update this comment by adding a reaction.
After the new comment content has been posted, I would like to remove this reaction again.

(This can of course as well be handled by adding text and replacing it later. If you want, I can think of a better use case 😂 )

[peter-evans]

Hi @oxc

I might be able to support this. What I'm thinking could work is to add a new input called reactions-edit-mode, similar to the current edit-mode input. It would default to append, which is what happens now, but it could be changed to replace. When it's set to replace, the action would remove all reactions not in the list of reactions.

I think the challenge with implementing this is going to be fetching the existing reactions and finding those that match the user of the token currently in use. Using the REST API that doesn't look easy because it could be a comment with thousands of reactions and I would need to page through them all. It might be easier to achieve using the GraphQL API, but that would need some investigation.

I'm not going to be able to add this feature in quickly but I'll take a look when I have time. Thank you for suggesting it!

In the meantime, you could attempt to remove reactions yourself by calling the API using github-script.

[oxc]

Cool, thanks for your elaborate feedback!

An alternative could of course be to just add a remove-reactions property and let the user worry about state tracking (which is probably not required in most cases).

[eseyfert]

Would love to see this implemented as well. For our use, just replacing all reactions with a new set would be more than enough, no need for tracking who the reactions belong to. Would it be feasible to start with a "dumber" implementation like that first and then make it more sophisticated later on?

Thank you for your efforts!

[peter-evans]

Released the reactions-edit-mode feature in v3.0.0 / v3.