Promotable Sandboxes and Mobile Offline

Working Offline with Promotable Sandboxes

As you now know, Promotable Sandboxes is a powerful feature that allows you to deliver updates to your production TrackVia account with minimal downtime. If your use case leverages TrackVia’s offline mobile capabilities, we have additional good news: offline users can continue to work in the app while changes are being promoted from a Sandbox to Production!

How does it work?

The graphic above walks through a simple (3) step process. Initially, we know that we have users working offline. They are following the normal procedures to sync their devices with TrackVia and ensure they have the latest data needed.

In section two, a Super Admin has initiated a promotion of changes from a Promotable Sandbox to Production. All users are signed out of the app while this promotion is occurring.

However, users who are working offline can continue adding/editing data they have access to offline throughout this promotion event.

Note: If an Offline user attempts to come online and sync with TrackVia in the middle of a promotion event, the sync upload will pause and wait until the promotion event is complete and Production is unlocked.

In section three, the promotion event has completed, users are able to access the app and all offline devices will attempt to sync as normal.

Considerations

1. It is always best practice to alert your end users about when you are planning to promote changes to Production using a Promotable Sandbox and to promote outside of normal business hours, if possible, as there will be a period when users are unable to access the app. Encourage Offline users to sync data before the promotion event if possible.

2. Editing the Views and Forms that Offline users are utilizing will cause their data to be sent to the data offload table in your account. 

When Offline users come back online after a promotion event, the sync will proceed as normal. If the specific Forms and Views that an Offline user is utilizing were modified as a result of the promotion event, the uploads from the device will fail as expected and be sent to the data offload table for admin to triage as normal.

Allowing Offline users to work through a promotion event is only recommended if the changes being made to the app do not modify existing Offline resources.

Additional Resources:

Using Microservices and Sandbox Accounts

Using the Open API and Sandbox Accounts