Hi Alumio,
The more complicated our routes become, the more we find we’re missing a vital tool in Alumio: some type of version control between environments.
The first step (the actual ‘version control’/history in the UI) has already been taken, but that doesn’t fix the primary issue we’re having: when a customer development ticket touches maybe 4 different routes, 10 different transformers and creates a few new ones, how do we tell what we actually need to import/export to the live environment?
Ofcourse, we could use something like Git and ‘hard’ configurations, but that would require an actual deployment on the Alumio side. Something that’s not really what we’d like.
The labelling/tagging system that’s on the roadmap will fix a piece of this: when we’re working on a particular feature, we could just ‘tag’ all the changed configurations with the same tag (i.e. the ticket number from the project management tool or something), and easily see exactly what needs to be put on the live environment.
You could go ‘all the way’ towards a GIT like solution and basically create a “branch switcher” on the UAT environment. That would be awesome, since it would also allow “independent” testing (i.e. go into feature-branch A to just test A and feature-branch B to test B). But it would also involve a very large amount of complexity.
So I’m wondering about a smaller solution which would still solve the primary issue (it being: you only want to ‘deploy’ changes for a single feature, even if multiple features change the same Route): let’s say you put a ‘Edit Mode’ switcher on the right hand corner of the screen. This would allow you to input text (i.e. the ticketnumber, so “AL-100”). Every edit you then do and save, the actual version in the version-control would be saved with that specific ticketnumber.
You’d then just need the ability to export all configurations (in the specific version latest version) labelled as “AL-100”.