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 documentation, we'll take a look at creating a completely custom notifications UI in our application in a headless way using Knock's hooks.

Getting started

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)

Installing dependencies

Implement `KnockProvider`

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.

Initialize the Knock client

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

Initialize the feed instance

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.

Feed mode

By default, the feed is initialized in compact mode, which returns a leaner payload with some lesser-used fields omitted. See FeedItem for more details on the payload schema.

Mode	Behavior
`compact`	Default. Omits `activities`, `total_activities`, and all but one actor. Omits nested arrays and objects from `data`.
`rich`	Returns the full payload of each `FeedItem`.

If your application needs the full payload, pass { mode: "rich" } as the third argument to useNotifications:

Creating a custom notifications UI

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

Marking items as seen

When you build a custom feed UI using the headless hooks, you're responsible for marking items as seen. The prebuilt components like NotificationFeedPopover handle this automatically by calling feedClient.markAllAsSeen() when the feed opens, but the headless hooks don't.

If you don't mark items as seen, unseen_count never decreases and any badge based on it never clears.

Marking all items as seen

A common pattern is to mark all items as seen when the feed opens:

Marking individual items as seen

You can also mark items as seen individually, for example as they scroll into view:

Wrapping up

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