Changelog

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.

Read the documentation to get started →

Building in-app UI docs

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.

Check out the new documentation →

PHP SDK

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.

PHP SDK on Github →

Fixes and improvements

• 🌱 We now show items that have been removed from a batch in our debugger
• 🌱 We made our new documentation search even more thorough as we now index all of our API reference too
• 👀 Users can now be added from the dashboard in any environment, previously we restricted them from being created in production
• 👀 We added the ability to filter workflows by a category and cleaned up the workflows list

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.

Read the documentation to get started →

Search the Knock docs

A popular request for our API documentation is finally here! Now you can search for items in our API docs to find what you need. Enjoy!

Fixes and improvements

• 🌱 You can now clone workflow steps from within the workflow editor
• 🌱 Workflow logs are now viewable on each workflow under a new “Logs” tab, filtered to show API logs for just that workflow
• 🌱 We now support Mailjet as an email channel
• 🌱 Read-only requests (e.g. loading user feeds) are a little faster thanks to under-the-hood improvements

Learn with our example app

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:

1. Send welcome emails to new users after signup
2. Trigger cross-channel notifications across email and in-app surfaces when actions happen in the app
3. Power Slack integrations, including resource-to-channel notifications
4. Customize user preferences per workflow and channel type
5. Enable users to mute notifications for a particular resource
6. 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!

Check out the example app repo →

Fixes and improvements

• 👀 We now display better error messages when logs can't be retrieved
• 👀 We now support liquid tags on email channels from name attribute
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where email preview errors weren't being communicate well to dashboard users

Send silent push notifications with Knock

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:

1. Send a silent push notification
2. Delay (long enough for the device to load their content)
3. 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
}

Read the documentation to get started →

Fixes and improvements

• 🌱 The objects page on the dashboard now shows preferences (Previously object preferences were only managed via the API)
• 🌱 Email channel settings can now use liquid tags and be dynamically populated
• 🌱 We now support deleting user and object channel data via the API
• 👀 We now lazy load message delivery logs and limit the list of logs to 25 at a time to keep the experience snappy
• 👀 We improved email layout previews to look even more accurate to what is actually sent
• 🐛 When viewing batched workflows in the debugger, we show more detail about batched workflows including their current status

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. 👍

Read the documentation to get started →

Fixes and improvements

• 👀 We added a better empty state display for Objects when none was found for a given collection
• 👀 We improved the design of the variable pane in the message template editor
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where message logs for email notifications with attachments were taking long to be retrieved in dashboard

More granular preference options with conditions

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:

{
  "argument": "data.pageId",
  "operator": "not_contains",
  "variable": "recipient.mutedPageIds"
}

Read the documentation to get started →

More accurate email previews

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

New messages API

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.

Read the API documentation →

Fixes and improvements

• 👀 Our identify endpoint no longer requires a name or an email for a user
• 🐛 We fixed a bug where nested variable paths weren't being properly parsed when a value existed for a top level path in the template editor
• 🐛 We fixed an edge case in our push sender where sending any empty data payload on a notify call would cause an error

Send Discord notifications with Knock

Now you can use Knock to power the notifications you send to Discord.

We support incoming webhooks and Discord bots, so whether you're sending notifications to an internal Discord channel or to a bot that your users are OAuth'ing into their own Discord servers, Knock has you covered.

Like all channels in Knock, once you've configured Discord you're ready to add it into any of your notification workflows. Plus, you'll get full observability into the responses we receive from the Discord API so you can debug as needed.

Learn more about our Discord integration →

Fixes and improvements

• 🌱 We shipped a new request buffer to help buffer incoming workflow trigger requests at scale
• 🌱 We shipped our new push documentation to our docs after it had previously lived in our legacy support feature guides
• 👀 We made a number of improvements to the variable pane editor. Now when you remove all references to a variable in your templates, its corresponding variable is automatically removed from the pane. If you rename all instances of a variable, its corresponding variable in the pane is renamed. This is a big win for variable pane usability 🙌
• 👀 We improved our messaging in the debugger about skipped batch steps when a batch key could not be found in the data payload of the workflow trigger
• 🐛 We fixed a bug where new users could be created by calling the preferences endpoint with a non-existing user_id
• 🐛 We fixed a bug where certain template schemas would cause the app to crash upon attempting to view a workflow
• 🐛 We fixed a bug where the email preview pane would hang when it couldn't find a layout with which to render the preview

Fixes and improvements

It's been a whirlwind of a week here at Knock HQ with our official launch yesterday 🎉

And now, we are back to our regularly scheduled programs — shipping!

• 🌱 knock.app got a facelift with brand new designs!
• 🌱 We added a system status page: status.knock.app
• 🌱 We added JSON editor support for Slack
• 🌱 We added email attachments support for Mailgun
• 👀 Improved the design of toast alerts throughout dashboard
• 👀 Improved the design of associated activities in the message overview
• 👀 Improved the description of the batch key behavior in the workflow editor
• 👀 Improved the empty state display for objects, and non-development environments
• 👀 Added an ability to add a short description (up to 280 chars) to your workflows
• 👀 Added an ability to use liquid syntax for email overrides
• 👀 [Docs] Added a language selector for all of code examples
• 👀 We now automatically set the default retention period of 365 days when creating an in-app channel
• 👀 We now automatically create a message template when creating a new channel step in a workflow
• 👀 We now consistently refer to "uncommitted" changes instead of "unstaged" in some places previously
• 👀 We now display a configured provider logo when choosing a channel step in the workflow editor
• 🐛 Added the missing chat type to the workflows filter
• 🐛 Fixed an issue of accidental duplicate user accounts when signing up by handling user emails case insensitive
• 🐛 Fixed the "View Workflow" link in the popover menu in the Workflows table
• 🐛 Fixed an issue where cloning a workflow with overrides was erroring
• 🐛 Fixed a request timeout issue with viewing certain log items
• 🐛 Fixed the message status logic to use the highest status when there are multiple messages (if one message is "read" and another is "seen", then the evaluated status is "read")
• 🐛 [Docs] Fixed the "Flash of Unstyled Text" (FOUT) issue

Power your Microsoft Teams notifications with Knock

Following our recent Slack support release, we are delighted to announce we now support Microsoft Teams as a new provider for our chat channel type 🎉.

Learning how to integrate with a new 3rd-party chat app provider can be a pain. You have to read through a lot of documentation just to understand how their integration model works, and you have to learn their message formatting syntax. With our Teams integration, we're abstracting away the schlep so you can focus on what matters: delivering great messaging.

You can add a Teams step to any of your workflows, just like any other channel. Once you do, we let you use basic markdown to edit your notification templates—we handle the translation into Microsoft's Adaptive Card syntax. If you want to build more advanced Teams messages, we give you a JSON editor so you can write Adaptive Cards yourself.

Like all channels in Knock when you use Teams you get full observability into the responses we receive from the Teams API, and you can store Teams channel data on user or non-user recipients.

Learn more about our Microsoft Teams integration →

Workflows: read-only mode

Knock was built with isolated environments from day one to ensure our customers didn't accidentally make changes to notifications in production. As of today, you can navigate into your production workflows in a safe, read-only mode so you can see which version is live in your production environment (and send test notifications as you need to.)

Fixes and improvements

• 🌱 We added support for users to change their user names within the Knock dashboard
• 👀 We updated the template editor theme to make it easier to parse liquid keywords, variables, and control flow operators