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Sandboxes explained

A sandbox is a copy of your application in which you can make changes without making these changes directly in your live application

What is a sandbox?

A sandbox is a copy of your application where you can build and test changes before they reach your live application. Once you're happy with the result, you merge the sandbox back into your application. Merging is effectively a production release — the new features or bug fixes become available to the application's end users.

Keep in mind that while one or more sandboxes exist, the original application is locked for editing. It becomes editable again once all sandboxes have been merged or deleted.

 

Why use sandboxes?

 

If your application is already in use by clients or is undergoing major changes you don't want to break something in the existing application. You can add a sandbox, build in this sandbox, test the new feature, and if you like the results merge it to the existing application.

If anything goes wrong you can just delete the sandbox and start over while still having the existing application intact. This way your existing application won't risk any harm. 

Copy data to a sandbox

When creating a sandbox only data from settings models is copied to the new sandbox. You can check this option on a model. You can view how to create a sandbox here.

Beware! A settings model works both ways, when you change data in the sandbox it will also change in the live environment after merging.

Another option is using the export and import function to move data around between environments. You can view information about this: Import action step & Export action step

Configurations

Configurations in your application are mostly used to set authentication for remote data sources. Configurations are environment-dependent. This means that their value is different in each application in your DTAP-street.

When you create the configuration in your sandbox and merge this, the configuration will be merged empty. You will have to assign its values again in the original application. Because configurations are environment-dependent it is possible to have the real authentication and test authentication setup at the same time between environments.

Notes

  • Watch out for mail actions — you can still send emails from your sandbox. You don't want to send a customer an invoice with test data.

  • Create test data for different cases so you can quickly check that new features don't interfere with existing ones.

Read how to use sandboxes for your DTAP-street here.