Building custom notification feed UI with hooks (headless)

Using our @knocklabs/react and @knocklabs/client libraries, you can create fully custom notification UIs that are backed by the Knock Feed API and real-time service.

In this guide, we'll take a look at creating a completely custom notifications UI in our application in a headless way using the Knock hooks.

To use this example, you'll need an account on Knock, as well as an in-app feed channel with a workflow that produces in-app feed messages. You'll also need:

• A public API key for the Knock environment (set as KNOCK_PUBLIC_API_KEY)
• The channel ID for the in-app feed (set as KNOCK_FEED_CHANNEL_ID)

First, we'll need to implement the KnockProvider component somewhere in your component tree and authenticate against the Knock API using a user id and API key.

Next, we'll need to access the instance of the Knock client created by the KnockProvider using the useKnockClient hook.

Next, we'll want to set up an instance of a Knock Feed, which will handle the state management and provide a way for us to interact with the messages on the feed.

The last step is to render our notifications UI using the data that's exposed via the state store (items and metadata).

There's a lot more we can do with our notifications UI, but we'll leave that as an exercise to the reader. Here are some examples:

• Adding mark as read, and archiving behavior to the notification cell
• Displaying a count of the total number of notifications