Delay function

Timestamp-based delays are helpful for reminders about resources in your product that need to be completed or addressed by a specific point in time. As an example, if a user has a task that's due three days from now and you want to remind them 24 hours before it's due, you can set a timestamp delay for the task's due date minus 24 hours.

An example timestamp

You can then reference that in your delay step settings as data.delayUntil.

A duration will take the current time that the delay step is executing and add the duration to it to produce the delay until time. A duration object is an entity that you can set on recipients, tenants, environment variables, or in your data payload and reference on your delay step.

The duration schema

An example duration

Let's say you want to express a duration that delays for 15 minutes, here's how you structure that:

You then reference that as data.delayDuration in the delay step configuration.

A window rule determines a dynamic interval for when the delay should close. It allows you to express rules like "delay until Monday at 9am".

The window rule will always be evaluated in the recipient's timezone (when set) and will fall back to the account default timezone, or "Etc/UTC".

The window rule schema

Example window rule

Let's say you want to express setting a window rule for delaying until Monday at 9am, here's how you might structure that on your recipient:

Now you can set the delay window key to recipient.delayUntil to reference this window rule.

Often when you're testing your Knock workflows, you'll want your delay durations to be shorter in non-production environments to aid with testing. To set per-environment delay duration you can:

• Create a new variable under Settings > Variables with a relative duration as JSON ({ "unit": "seconds", "value": 30 }) and a name of delayDuration. You can set per-environment values to specify a shorter or longer window as needed
• Set your delay duration to "Wait until a dynamic interval"
• Specify that your delay duration will come from an environment variable
• Set the key to delayDuration, which will resolve the delay duration from the variable you created

You can use the workflow cancellation API to cancel a delayed workflow. You must use a unique cancelation key to cancel a previously triggered workflow run.

A workflow can be delayed for a maximum of 365 days (1 year).

Knock will ensure that your delayed workflow run will execute within ~1 - 5s of the delayed time.

We currently don't have a way to view all delayed workflow runs with pending messages. If this is a feature you need, please reach out as we'd love to hear your use case.