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Rendering guides

Rendering guides

How to render guides to power your in-product messaging.

In this document you'll learn how to render guides in your product using the guides API.

Getting started

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1

Setup the KnockGuideProvider within your product.

You'll need to ensure the guide provider is a child component of the KnockProvider. You can find the channelId for your guide on the guide details page in the dashboard.

2

Build a component to render your guide.

3

Mount your component under the KnockGuideProvider.

Once mounted in your application tree, if your user becomes eligible for the guide, then the component will be rendered and displayed to your users.

Working with fetched guides

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Knock exposes a useGuide hook, which accepts either a type (corresponding to a message type key) or a key (a specific guide key) to select a guide from the fetched set of guides.

Here's how to think about when to use both of these:

  • key: If you want your component to only ever render a specific instance of a guide, like when building an embedded UI, then use the key selector.
  • type: If you want to render any guide that uses this message type, like when building a generic "Banner" component that could be used multiple times across many guides, but only ever shows a single banner at a time, then use the type selector.
    • When multiple guides exist for a single type, we return the most recently created guide first. We are in-progress on a guides ordering feature where you will be able to control this behavior from the Knock dashboard and manually configure which guide should return first.

In the future we'll be adding a useGuides (plural) hook to return one or more guides that match a set of criteria. Please let us know if you need this.

Handling engagement tracking

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Each guide step exposes methods to work with engagement tracking:

  • step.markAsSeen: mark that the user has seen the guide, but not yet interacted with it.
  • step.markAsInteracted: mark the step as interacted with, optionally passing metadata about the interaction
  • step.markAsArchived: mark the step as archived, making it no longer visible for the user.

If you need to understand the current status of the guide step, you can access the state under step.message which will expose a StepMessageState including:

  • seen_at: when the message was last seen (timestamp or null)
  • read_at: when the message was last read (timestamp or null)
  • interacted_at: when the message was last interacted
  • archived_at: when the message was last archived

Advanced: working with the GuideClient

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In certain cases, you may need to drop down to operate on the guide client, which is the state management layer automatically created when you mount a GuideProvider.

You can always access the guide client by using the useGuideContext hook:

One use case for accessing the guide client is to force a refetch of the users eligible guides, which you can do through the guideClient.fetch() method.