Custom Wait Activity Control

Question

I'm planning to build a Custom Wait Activity for Journey Builder. I need an activity that users can configure (simple and fast) the number of wait days, but with one option to the contact only continue if the date is a selected weekday, e.g. Select to contacts, in which reached the activity, waits 2 days, but only proceed if the wait's ending day is a monday, tuesday or wednesday (in case is not one of those selected weekdays, the contact waits for the following monday).

I understood that the custom activity is basically one App that communicates directly with Journey Builder. In case of a Custom Wait Activity, the control of when the user proceed (or for how long waits) stays with the custom app or the app send the information to Journey Builder (and the Journey Builder holds the contact)?

Answer 1

I don't believe any of the queueing functionality that supports wait activities has been exposed for use in Custom Journey Builder activities. Your activity can't hold up the flow of the contact through the interaction. The execute route of your application is hit by Journey when the contact passes through that point in the journey, you return a response and the contact moves on to the next activity in the workflow.

As a workaround, your Custom Activity could update some date field in the contact model and you could place a Wait by Attribute activity immediately after your Custom Activity that waits until the date you've placed in that field for the contact. I've not tried it, but you could also investigate passing back a date as an outArgument to see if your Wait By Attribute could wait based on that Journey Data field.

Answer 2

As @Macca explained, it's not possible to build a Custom Wait Activity. Another option would be to build a Custom Split Activity where your activity determines the wait period and then add corresponding wait periods to the Activity branches.