Identify users and objects within your notify calls
Today we're making it even easier to create and update your users and objects in Knock. You can now perform user and object identifications as an inline action within calls to the workflow trigger API.
When calling the trigger API, you can choose to include maps of properties describing users and objects to identify in Knock in the recipients and actor fields. While processing your workflow, we'll create or update each of these recipients accordingly.
Our goal is to make Knock as straight forward as possible for you to get started, and powerful enough to scale with your ever evolving needs. With inline identification, you can trigger your first Knock notification with a single API call, as well as explore new ways to manage your users in Knock.
Today we’re launching Knock analytics. With Knock analytics, you get a single dashboard for understanding the notifications you’re sending across all of your Knock channels, in all of your Knock environments.
With Knock analytics you can understand:
How your overall notification usage is trending over time.
How usage volume compares across your different channels and workflows, and whether there are opportunities to batch notifications to decrease the notification volume you’re sending to your users.
How your delivery rates look for each of your notification channels so you can quickly identify configuration issues.
One of the core value props of Knock is that we act as a single layer to interact with all your delivery providers and their data. Knock analytics is a big part of that, giving you a single place to find valuable insights about the cross-channel notifications you send to your customers.
Fixes and improvements
🌱 We expanded the integration guide in our documentation to cover every provider we support
Use outbound webhooks to respond in realtime to events within Knock
Today we’re shipping support for webhooks in Knock so that you can more easily respond to the notification events happening and keep your system synchronized with the data in Knock. For more advanced use-cases of Knock, our customers need to keep track of the data that we’re generating within their own system. Given the inherently asynchronous nature of sending notifications, there hasn't been a great way to do this today without polling data endpoints. Enter webhooks!
In your dashboard you'll now see a page where you can configure a webhook to listen to a number of events related to messages sent via your workflows. Once you set up an endpoint in your service to receive them, you can add the URL to the webhook creator and select which events you'd like to subscribe to. When your webhook starts sending requests you'll see delivery logs for those in the dashboard as well.
Some examples of how you can put webhooks to use in your system:
Store messages longer than our internal retention period
Populate a custom log of the messages sent to individual users in your system
Execute a side-effect in your application if a specific event occurs
With webhooks, you're in more control of your notification data than ever before.
When we first built the Knock Feeds API and React component library, we built them with feeds in mind. Since then we've seen customers use our notification infrastructure to build feeds, toasts, inboxes, preferences experiences, and much more! We've completely re-built our in-app UI documentation to showcase our in-app use cases and how to support them, whether you're building with React, Javascript, or React Native.
We've expanded our SDK coverage to support PHP. That means you're now easily able to integrate Knock into your Laravel applications with ease! You can get started with the PHP SDK by running composer require knocklabs/knock-php, or looking at our docs.
Batch notifications dynamically with user, environment, or notify data
Building on our dynamic batch window work earlier this month, batch steps can now be configured with a dynamic batch window that draws from recipient, actor, notify, or environment variable data. A few use cases this unlocks:
Power per-user digests, where the digest frequency (i.e. daily, weekly) is set as a per-user preference
Use an environment variable to shorten batch windows in development and staging environments for easier testing
Set a batch window with data sent in your notify call, such as the priority or severity of an issue
Simply select "Batch for a dynamic window" followed by the batch window type (Recipient, Actor, or Data) and provide the batch window key for looking up the batch window value. This value can be either an ISO-8601 timestamp (e.g. 2022-05-05T20:00:00Z), or it can be a relative duration in the following format:
{ "unit": "minutes", // Must be one of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months "value": 10 // Any non-negative integer}
With this release, our batch function just got even more powerful and we're excited to see what our customers use it to build.
Today we're announcing our first example app. We're a team that loves to learn by example when we're picking up new developer tools. The fastest way to understand how a tool works is to see it working in real code. Now you can learn by example when you're trying out Knock.
With the Knock example app you can see how a hypothetical collaboration product uses Knock to:
Send welcome emails to new users after signup
Trigger cross-channel notifications across email and in-app surfaces when actions happen in the app
Power Slack integrations, including resource-to-channel notifications
Customize user preferences per workflow and channel type
Enable users to mute notifications for a particular resource
Identify users and their preferences during initial setup with our bulk APIs
Our example app will continue to evolve as we ship new improvements, so stay tuned for more updates!
If you've used a smartphone, you know about push notifications. You may not be as familiar with silent push notifications.
Silent push notifications wake up your app in the background without interrupting your user. As Apple explains it, “A [silent push notification is a notification that doesn’t display an alert, play a sound, or badge your app’s icon. It wakes your app in the background and gives it time to perform some actions”.
An example: in a news reader app you might send silent push notifications when there's new content you want your app to download in the background. Once the new content has finished downloading, you could send a normal push to your user with the latest headline. When your user opens the app, the content is ready, making the experience snappy and polished.
Starting today, Knock supports silent push notifications on Apple, Firebase Cloud Messaging, and Expo Push. For our news reader example, what would have been a complicated set of backend logic becomes a single API call to a three step workflow whenever breaking news arrives:
Send a silent push notification
Delay (long enough for the device to load their content)
Send a normal push notification
You can learn more about how to use silent push notifications in our docs.
Dynamic batch windows
Knock has always supported batching notifications over a set window of time. Now, batch steps can be configured to take a dynamic batch window that is set when you trigger your workflow.
A dynamic batch window will wait for an interval of time provided by you in the data of your notify call under a key you set when you create your workflow. The key you specify in the workflow editor can be dot-delimited (e.g. nested.path.to.window) to reach nested attributes. When this workflow step runs, Knock will use this value to set when your batch window will close.
This value can be either an ISO-8601 timestamp (e.g. 2022-05-05T20:00:00Z), or it can be a relative duration in the following format:
{ "unit": "minutes", // Must be one of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months "value": 10 // Any non-negative integer}
Design beautiful notifications with our visual template editor
Today is a good day. We’re shipping our visual template editor to make it even easier to craft great-looking product notifications from within Knock.
Now you can use our drag-and-drop editor to build great looking email notifications that include text, buttons, quotes, and dividers, all without having to write a single line of 90s-era email HTML. (IYKYK.) This is a low code editor, not a no code editor. This means that we take away all the annoying parts of writing email templates, while still giving you the flexibility of markdown, HTML, and liquid syntax for variable injection and control flow. And of course if you want to write raw HTML and CSS on your own, you're always welcome to.
We’ve even added new branding settings so you can ensure your brand elements are consistent across all of your product messaging. 🌠
As of today, our visual template editor is only available for email templates. We’ll be expanding the visual template editor to other channel types with interactive components such as Slack later this year. For notification channels with text-only templating—SMS, push, in-app—you’ll be able to use the same code editor you already use in Knock. 👍
When working with preferences, you’ll sometimes run into advanced use cases where you need to provide even more granular preference options for your customers. For example: you may want to let a user mute notifications about a given resource in your product. That’s where preference conditions come into use in the Knock model: they provide a powerful way for you to add extra logic that’s computed during preference evaluation per recipient.
You can now apply a set of conditions to an individual category, workflow, or channel type preference, which will need to return true to send the notification out. The conditions you create can reference properties in your data payload or on the recipient. Here's an example of a condition where we only send a notification if the current resource is not in a list of muted ids for a recipient:
We know making sure you see an accurate preview for your notifications is crucial when creating your notifications. Previously, we had rendered a close approximation of your emails on the client, but there were some cases where what you would see in the preview tab would differ from what you'd see when you ran a test.
From today we now render the emails on the backend, applying the same set of transformations to the email as you get before it's delivered to your users. This means a much more accurate previewing experience, CSS warts and all #htmltables4eva.
Fixes and improvements
👀 We now show you the variable pane on our workflow builder, with a new button in the top bar to toggle the variable pane on and off in both the builder and the message template editor
👀 We moved the action menu in the email template editor into the top bar, cleaning up the UI
🐛 We fixed an issue where our users.identify and objects.set endpoints weren't correctly upserting data
🐛 We fixed an issue with attachments on AWS SES not coming through correctly
🐛 We fixed an issue in our Elixir SDK where calling the Users.get_feed/3 endpoint with no options would cause an error
Now you can bring the messages you send with Knock into your own product to power customer support and message logging use cases. Our new message API endpoints allow you to list all of the messages generated by Knock, as well as access additional message information such as batched activities, triggering events, and message content. Our messages API also supports a number of filtering options, so you can easily find the messages you're looking for.
