Workflow builder 3.0

The workflow builder is the visual interface for designing workflows in the Knock dashboard. It allows you to express complex cross-channel notification logic in an easy to reason about way.

After months of development, we're excited to announce a rebuild of the workflow builder with a new architecture, improved performance, and a more intuitive user experience. We've poured a lot of love into this update, and we're excited to share it with you today.

Here are a few of the key differences in the new workflow builder:

• 🚀 Performance: The new workflow builder has been rebuilt from the ground up with a focus on performance. You'll notice that actions like adding and removing steps now feel instant, making it a delight to use.
• 🧩 Refreshed design: We've updated the visual style of the workflow builder to use our Telegraph design system. This includes a new color palette, typography, and iconography.
• 💪 Simplified step editing: Each step panel in the workflow builder has been rebuilt from the ground up to be more intuitive and easier to use.
• 😵‍💫 Goodbye spinners: We've removed virtually all of the loading spinners from the workflow builder as a result of our new architecture, making actions feel more responsive.

Our goal at Knock is to build a powerful product that feels delightful to use, and we're confident that with our new workflow builder foundation, we're well on our way to achieving that goal. We will be making more improvements in the coming weeks, and you'll see us start to roll out these changes to the template editor next as well.

Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks, and we'd love to hear your feedback in the meantime.

Fixes and improvements

• 🐛 We fixed a bug where the test runner could not be accessed in non-development environments

Relative delay windows

Our delay step allows your workflow runs to pause for a certain amount of time before continuing, which is useful for scheduling reminders or other longer lived notifications. Previously, delay windows supported either a fixed amount of time (e.g. 30 minutes) or a dynamic value based on a property available in the workflow run scope.

Now with relative delay windows, you can specify a delay that is relative to a dynamic value provided, such as "30 minutes before the task is due" or "2 days after the task is created".

Relative delay windows are available now under the delay step in the workflow editor. You can get started by reading the documentation.

Fixes and improvements

• 👀 We've visually refreshed the date time comparison component in the dashboard to better understand a timestamp relative to the current user's timezone
• 👀 We've introduced a new search button to workflows, partials, and users to more easily find an item in the dashboard
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where certain pages on the dashboard would break out of their parent scroll container, causing the entire page to scroll
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where a member role could not upload tenant logos

User and preference data, now available in your warehouse

At Knock, we're always looking for more opportunities to give you access to the data that's available within your Knock account so that you can analyze it along with the rest of your product usage data.

With today's release, you can now receive a stream of user and preferences changes directly into your data warehouse. This makes it easy to build models that analyze your notification opt-out rates and how user profile information in Knock changes over time.

This feature is available to Enterprise customers who have set up a data warehouse sync. Read our documentation to learn more.

Fixes and improvements

• 👀 We've moved trigger data into the data property in the template editor, so you now access properties as {{ data.property_name }}
• 👀 We added a link to the billing portal for all customers to see their current daily usage quotas
• 👀 We added support for base_logo_url and base_icon_url when applying tenant branding so that the original branding properties can still be referenced
• 🐛 We removed support from our editor for unsupported liquid tags like date_to_string
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where creating a new HTML partial would not immediately appear in the blocks sidebar
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where committing a change to a partial would not be reflected in the workflows and templates that use it
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where the member role in the account could not upload tenant branding
• 🐛 We fixed an issue with our RadioCard component to ensure the selected state is reflected correctly
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where passing created_at to Segment identifies could cause an error

Validating workflow trigger data

The data you pass into your Knock workflows is essential to ensure your notifications have the right content and context. Previously, if you omitted a value or passed through the wrong type of data into your workflow triggers, you could lead to malformed or incorrect notifications. Given how critical this data is, we're rolling out the ability to validate the incoming data for your workflow trigger by providing a JSON schema that describes the expected data.

When provided, if the data does not match the schema the workflow trigger API will return a 422 Unprocessable Entity response with a list of errors. This ensures that your workflows are not run should incorrect data be provided.

You can configure a validation schema for your workflow trigger under the "Trigger step" in the workflow builder. It's also possible to supply the workflow trigger schema via our management API and CLI via the trigger_data_json_schema field.

Trigger data validation is available today to all Knock customers. Read our documentation to learn more about how this feature works.

Fixes and improvements

• 👀 We added support for MessageMedia as a new SMS provider
• 👀 We added support for event idempotency through source events (docs)
• 👀 We now expose url and any message interaction data to Segment and Heap for link click and interacted events respectively
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where saving and committing a partial would not update the underlying schema
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where some JSON editors would not scroll correctly

Reuse content across templates with Partials

Today we’re releasing support for Partials, a new way to author pieces of content for reuse across templates. Partials are independently updated, versioned, and archived, and can be managed programmatically with the Knock CLI and management API.

Partials are now available to all customers. Read our documentation to learn more about how this feature works.

Fixes and improvements

• 👀 We've made some UI and UX improvements to the workflow list and show pages in the dashboard
• 👀 We've improved the pagination of the workflow list in the dashboard. Paginating will now update the URL, so that refreshing the page or going back will take you to the correct page
• 👀 We added a keyboard shortcut to save translations (cmd + enter)
• 👀 We added new autocomplete suggestions for liquid tags in the template editor. Now when you type {% you'll see suggestions for common tags like assign, if, for, etc
• 🐛 We fixed a performance issue when typing in the create workflow modal
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where the billing page could be cut off at certain screen sizes

Trigger workflows only once per recipient

Today we’re releasing support for configuring workflow trigger frequency. You can now set a workflow to only trigger once per recipient (user, object or tenant) and never again. When enabled, if a workflow is run more than once for the same recipient, we will not execute the workflow.

Workflow trigger frequency is now available to all customers. Read our documentation to learn more about how this setting works.

Fixes and improvements

• 👀 We added support for a timezone in the date filter in the template editor
• 👀 We improved the scroll behavior around the dashboard, so returning to pages will restore your previous scroll position
• 👀 We disabled the per-word highlighting in commit diffs to improve readability
• 🐛 We loosened the required Expo and React Native versions for our React Native SDKs
• 🐛 We improved the consistency of the timezone and date filters in the template editor between editing and previewing templates

Commit and promote from a workflow

We've introduced a new way to commit and promote a workflow simultaneously right from the workflows page in your development environment. This feature streamlines the process of committing your changes and promoting them to the next environment without having to jump to the commits page. You can access this feature from any workflow page in the Knock dashboard.

Fixes

• 🐛 We fixed an issue where an event sent from Segment could still trigger an archived workflow
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where newlines in the code editor weren't working
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where send windows weren't working for a webhook channel step

Fixes and improvements

• 👀 We added the ability for you to specify a response key in your fetch steps, which controls where the response gets placed in your workflow run data
• 👀 You can now see any subscriptions you have under a tenant via the dashboard
• 👀 We updated the Workflow creation modal to include category selection and improved the manage modal experience
• 👀 We moved the security settings into its own tab in the settings section of the dashboard
• 👀 We added the ability to filter analytics by bounced messages in the dashboard
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where our custom webhook channel would send an empty body on GET requests
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where E.164 phone numbers were not always being validated correctly, causing issues when saving Twilio provider configuration
• 🐛 We fixed an issue that caused schedules to not be created when an account timezone was not set
• 🐛 We fixed an issue that could cause invalid FCM project IDs because of extra whitespace
• 🐛 We fixed an issue with the schedules API that would not allow a null repeats value when scheduled_at was specified
• 🐛 We fixed an issue with our Sendgrid sender that would specify the wrong content type parameter for an attachment

In-app feed components for iOS and Android

Today we're releasing an update to our native mobile SDKs across iOS and Android to include pre-built components for powering out-of-the-box in-app feed experiences within your mobile applications. Previously, you had to build your own in-app feed experiences on top of our SDK. Now, with these new components, you can easily add an in-app feed to your app with just a few lines of code. Knock takes care of all of the heavy lifting for you, including fetching and displaying the feed items, handling pagination, real-time badge counts, filtering, and more.

Our in-app feed components are customizable and can be tailored to fit your app's design and user experience. If you need more flexibility you can bring your own UI components, and build on top of the view models provided.

You can get started by reading the documentation on iOS and Android.

Fixes and improvements

• 👀 We gave the main dashboard sidebar UI an overhaul, updating the icons in the process
• 👀 We migrated the colors in the dashboard to our new design system, Telegraph
• 👀 We added new filters for the messages API for engagement status, inserted at ranges, and by a list of message ids
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where the code editor would fallback to a serif on certain browsers
• 🐛 We fixed an issue with the tenants API that could cause a 500 error when creating or listing tenants
• 🐛 We fixed an issue with the code editor where you could not scroll the content when using the popout editor

Automated push token deregistration

Today we're launching an enhancement to our push notification and device token management functionality. We will now auto revoke tokens that are expired from your user's channel data. Previously, you would need to listen to a message.bounced webhook and execute the token cleanup yourself when your push notifications failed to send.

Now, you can simply enable the option under your push channel settings to "Enable push token deregistration" and we'll automatically remove the expired token from your user's channel data when a push notification fails to send. This will help you keep your user's data clean and up to date without needing to write any additional code.

This feature is available today for all customers. To get started, check out the documentation for push notifications.

Fixes and improvements

• 👀 We added a new error page to better report any dashboard issues to our engineering team
• 👀 We made some light improvements to various empty states around the dashboard
• 👀 We added a missing filter for workflows to filter for all workflows that have a webhook step
• 👀 We now fall back to a recipient ID in the messages table when no email or name is provided on the recipient
• 🐛 We fixed an issue with single ticks in a Slack markdown template would cause a template rendering error