Often you will want to make changes to an existing published screen. Our platform lets you do this by creating and publishing new versions of your Screens, allowing you to rapidly iterate your Screen designs based on user feedback.
The published version of a Screen is considered to be the current stable, production copy for all users, and the platform automatically pushes this version to your app users.
This great Publishing functionality has some risks though if you want to make many changes and test out the changes as you go.
If you were to publish a new Form design every time you want to test out some Screen changes, you would risk disrupting live users with a broken/incomplete Screen design. Your users would also be capturing Form entries across many Form versions - this will make it difficult to track down entries in the Data area of the secure website, and also means you would have many different Form field configurations to cater for if you do any integration.
Thus we strongly recommend you rather use our Test mode when you are developing/testing changes to a Form design.
Test mode allows you to test and tweak your Screen changes during the design process.
Instead of continuously publishing new versions to see the changes on your device, you simply save changes in the relevant Screen designer while in Test mode, and then sync these changes to your device. Make more changes and test again. This without having to publish a new version of the screen every time.
It's a simple and easy way to iterate on your design, figuring out formula and other functionality you desire.
All you need to do is to hit the TEST button in the designer, then choose who will participate in the test.
Note that the TEST button is only available on screens that are in Draft status.
If you have a Published version, then you will need to first hit the NEW VERSION button. A new version of your screen will then be available in Draft status.
When you put a screen into Test mode, you must nominate the particular users that should see the Test version.
Often this might just be yourself as the designer, but you can also add more users later if you want to expand the testing group.
While a screen is put into Test mode, the Published version (if one exists) will remain visible to everyone else.
So you are free to change the screen design as much as you like, without fear of disturbing the stable production version of your screen. As long as the form is in Test mode, your testers' devices will update every time you save changes to the form design.
This makes it easy to make a change, save the design, then jump over to your device to test it out.
The only thing you need to ensure is that an app synchronization occurs, so that the changed design is downloaded to the device.
You can do this by simply sending the app to the background and bringing it back to the foreground. Otherwise, you can click on the Force Sync button in the settings screen off the app.
Once you are done with your testing and have finalized the design changes, you're ready to roll out the new version to all your users.
To do this, simply hit the PUBLISH button - this will end the Test mode on your new version and set the version as being the current Published copy.
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