Overview
By default, whenever you update a Story in Tines, your changes are applied and live instantly. This works great for simpler use cases, and especially for building out v1 of your workflow.
For up-and-running, mission-critical workflows, however, it's important to have greater oversight of changes. You need to be able to safely experiment with ideas for improvements, and apply a complicated change-set in one fell swoop. That’s where Change Control comes in.
Enabling Change Control
For any Story, use the Manage dropdown to locate and enable the Change Control toggle.
Once, enabled, you’ll now have two working spaces and executional environments for your Story – Test and Live:
These Test and Live environments run independently of each other without any interference.
Testing changes
With Change Control enabled, it's not possible to directly edit the Live executional environment. Instead, you make your changes in Test, and – once you’re ready and it’s safe to do so – push them en masse to Live.
If attempting to edit the Live environment, a warning is shown.
When working in the Test environment, a blue bar is shown as a visual reminder of safety. Additionally, a Changes dropdown is surfaced when there are changes made to Test that have not yet been pushed to Live:
You can build inside Test as you normally would in Tines. Webhooks, Forms, and Actions can all run as normal.
Using different Resources and Credentials in the Test environment
Depending on your workflow development style, you may want to target independent test versions of some or all external services.
This can be achieved by using our META.story.is_test variable, and an IF function inside your action configuration. For example, to target your development Jira instance in Test, and your production instance in Live, you could use an expression like:
IF(META.story.is_test, CREDENTIAL.jira_test, CREDENTIAL.jira)Pushing changes live
Once you’re satisfied that your Test environment changes are complete and validated, you can push your changes by pressing Push in the Changes dropdown. (Or alternatively, you can Reset to the Live version if your changes aren’t working out.)
After pushing, your changes will be applied together in a single update.
Any in-flight story runs will immediately switch over to the new logic, consistent with how edits to non change-controlled stories are applied.
Limitations
The Test story is only active and capable of receiving Webhook events whilst it is being worked on by users within Tines, after a period of inactivity the test story is disabled and the Webhook will no longer process test mode requests.