Creating an AOE knockback?

Say I wanted to make it when someone right clicked with a stick, everyone near them got knocked back. I assume since tnt knocks people back in multiplayer now, I could create an explosion at that location. To stop the blocks from being damaged, would I need to use a blockbreakevent? And what about stopping the players from being damaged? Specifically because I want tnt to be on naturally aswell.

 

You can use World.createExplosion() and set the force to 0.0F. It won't damage blocks/players.

 

Perfect, thank you.

If I do this, it doesn't knockback the players. Any idea?

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

I would go about doing this by first getting where they clicked, find all entities within X range and get a vector to each one and set that entities velocity to that vector with an added Y coordinate.