Hi there... I have a suggestion to make...
Given that Knack does not currently have a good sandbox or staging capability, There is a possible workaround that can help off of us developers on the platform.
Currently once rules are changed or added into the environment, it becomes active immediately, impacting all aspects of the live environment (bugs included). We have situations where due to changing business needs, customers are constantly asking for new changes to the functions, business rules, and screen. As much as Knack is a Rapid development platform, not everything can be done in just one day. Building live apps with go live dates dictated by the customer under this environment is very challenging.
While we can develop new enhancements as a new live App, but porting all the changes from the new live App back to the Production environment app is a major challenge, esp where we need to keep to the customer's go live dates due to their respective launch dates, or regulatory requirements.
Can Knack consider some of the following suggestions:
a. allow rules, pages, to be embargoed - ie. commented or not come into effect until the code changes needs to come into effect (or uncommented). This will allow the developer to place the changes into the production environment, and only release the code when its time to launch the feature/capability in short time window.
b. allow code (or better still snippets of code) from one live app to be easily copied to that of another live app.
c. can the above be implemented on the new and/or the old Knack interfaces - as I notice that the new interface is still going thru a state of stabilization.
d. Control over when rules need to come into effect for production release must be implemented for all rules in Pages and also in the Schema - as they both control the workflow of the live application.
The best option would be to allow the Data from one app be to exported from one live app to another without loss of any data details or linkages/connections. This would be the best option. Then developers can independently develop enhancements on one live app, test it, then be able to move the live production data from the current production live app to the new enhanced live app. Right now the ability to export the data and reimport the data seem challenging as I notice that key data like the User passwords and some linkages are lost in the transition (between export and re-import of the data).
Thanks for your kind consideration.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if your need further clarification.
If anyone else have some better ideas to add on... please do, the above is just my 2 cents thoughts on this.
TQ.