Environments

What do environments do?

In Formsort, environments are spaces you can deploy your variants to for different purposes, and the variant environment it is deployed to will correspond to the environment set up in integrations.

For example, you want to test the changes your team is making to a variant in a mocked "live" environment, but also do not want these changes available to your users. In this case you'll want to set up a staging environment to run testing. First, you'd configure the staging environment endpoints (see editing environments below) to make sure you can receive test answers; then, you'll deploy your variant to the staging environment.

• Production should always be used for the "live" version of a flow. Flowstarts are counted when users load and interact with flows deployed to the production environment.

• Staging can be used to integrate with mock or test versions of your integrations, to create a production-like version of a flow that only talks to non-production systems. This is ideal for preventing production data contamination. It is optional to use staging, but for complex forms it is useful to have. Flowstarts do not count in this environment.

• You can create new environments if you need them. Flowstarts do not count in any new environments created. Test away!

Editing environments

Environments are defined per flow, and are shared across all variants of that flow, to ensure data integrity between variants.

From the flow index page, the Integrations tab will show the environments editor for your integrations.

Here it is possible to edit all aspects of integrations:

• create a new integration environment (e.g. create a "dev" environment)

• configure setup for a new integration target

• make updates to existing integration targets

Since adjustments are made on a per-environment basis, your production environment will likely have a different integration configuration than your staging environment.

Creating new environments

Clicking Edit... on the top right of the environment editor shows a list of the current environments and allows the addition of new environments. You will see that a production and staging environment are added by default.

Click +Add environment if you'd like to create a new environment. You can also delete environments in this menu.

Once you've added a new environment, you will see it's availability in the dropdown list of environments.

Saving and propagating changes

When changes have been made to any of the integrations, you will be prompted to save them, regardless of which environment you are in.

Deploying your variants to different environments

After saving the changes you've made to your integrations, your live variants need to be redeployed to the matching environment so that the changes can be propagated to your flow.

For instance, if integration changes have been made in your staging environment, make sure to deploy or redeploy any variants you are using to staging.

When you're ready to test, proceed to Loading different environments. Happy testing!