Canceling workflows

Canceling a workflow allows you to stop the sending of messages within a specified workflow for one or more recipients. This can be useful in settings like reminders where a notification needs to be canceled once a user has performed the intended action.

It's important to understand that only workflows that include a delay function or a batch function can be canceled within Knock, as without the built-in delay of a function Knock will immediately send a notification to your recipients.

Canceling a triggered workflow

To perform a cancellation, you first need to give Knock a pointer to understand how to uniquely identify the triggered workflow by providing a cancellation_key on the notify call.

You can read about generating workflow cancellation keys and some best practices in the triggering workflows guide.

Schema

Canceling for subsets of recipients

In some cases you may need to cancel a workflow for a subset of recipients only. You can do this by specifying the recipients list on the cancellation:

Cancellation gotchas

There are a few things to watch out for when using cancellations:

1. A cancellation cannot be performed on a specific channel step, it can only be performed against the entire workflow.

2. You cannot cancel a given workflow run after it has finished ; if you need to revoke messages for persistent channels like the in-app feed, then you can archive a message instead.

You can learn more about using cancellation with batch and delay functions in our workflow functions guide.