Creating a Promotable Sandbox

Promotable Sandboxes are a new feature that enhance the existing capabilities of our Sandbox feature, allowing for Super Admin to confidently push changes made in a Sandbox to your Production end users without needing to manually copy changes from the Sandbox to Production.

In this article, we’re going to walk through technical details related to using Promotable Sandboxes. If your account does not have the Sandbox feature enabled and you’re interested in exploring this capability, please contact your TrackVia Account Executive, Customer Success Manager, or reach out to our support team.

Creating a Promotable Sandbox

To create a Promotable Sandbox, create a Sandbox from your Sandbox Environments page just like normal, and toggle the Sandbox to be a Promotable Sandbox after naming it:

A Super Admin creating a Promotable Sandbox

Note: An account can only have one Promotable Sandbox created at a time. If your account is licensed for multiple Sandboxes, you can have additional non-Promotable Sandboxes. This is to prevent conflicts when pushing new development to Production

How does a Promotable Sandbox Impact Production?

As soon as your Promotable Sandbox has been created, note that all App Admin and Super Admin in your Production account will no longer be able to edit app structure in Production. All changes to Apps must occur in the Promotable Sandbox:

App Admin will see lock icons in Production, alerting them to the fact that a Promotable Sandbox exists.

As we can see in the message above, there are a few Administrative tasks that Admin can accomplish while a Promotable Sandbox exists:

1. Admin can still import data to existing tables as needed.

2. Admin can still access the “My Account” area of User Profile dropdown to configure Account-level settings.

3. Admin can still Add/Edit/Delete Notifications and Scheduled Shares on Views by navigating to the View’s View Options.

Here another example of the lock icon in Production lets your App Admin know that they need to edit resources such as Views, Forms, Dashboards, Filters, Flows, and Roles in the Promotable Sandbox:

Now that you know how a Promotable Sandbox affects Production, let's look at the new changes you will notice on the Promotable Sandbox record on your Sandbox Environments page:

1. A Promotable banner lets you know that this is your Promotable Sandbox and is responsible for Production being locked to App Admin & Super Admin development.
2. A drop-down menu with options to Demote or Delete your Sandbox, or access the Changelog for this sandbox.

Note: the ability to ‘Demote’ a Promotable Sandbox is an emergency mechanism that your Super Admin can use in case they need to immediately make a breaking change in Production. Demoting a Promotable Sandbox will cause you to no longer be able to Promote changes from that sandbox to Production.

Demoting a Promotable Sandbox should only be done in emergency situations

3. A button to Promote your changes to Production. We cover the details of what happens when you Promote changes in this article.

Up Next: Now that your Promotable Sandbox has been created let's look at how TrackVia tracks the changes that you’re making in your Promotable Sandbox.