Production and practice room
An instance has two data spaces. How to switch, and what is separate and what is shared.
An instance has two data spaces. Production holds the real data of your company. The practice room is for trying things out: records and files you create, change or delete there do not reach production.
Switching the room
In the top bar, to the right of the name of the instance, you see both rooms. Your room is marked, the other one is a button.
- Choose Practice room in the top bar.
- The page reloads and reports: Practice room. Changes to records and files do not reach production.
- The way back is in the same place, with Production.
You find the same switch on the page My access under Data space: Into the practice room and Back to production. The instance does not ask for confirmation, because one click takes the switch back.
The choice applies to your browser session. If you sign in with another browser, you start in production there.
How to recognise the room
- In the practice room the top bar has a different colour and a stripe along its top edge.
- On the right of the top bar the words Practice room appear in addition.
- The data view names the room below the title of every collection.
- The draft of a tool carries a band at the top that names the room.
What is separate
The rows of the collections and the files of the buckets are separate. Every collection and every bucket has its own contents in each room. In the practice room you only see what was created there. The data of production is not there, not even as a copy.
A file you upload in the practice room exists only there. If you delete it, production is untouched. The quota of a bucket applies per room: a full practice room does not block uploads in production.
You can open a released tool in both rooms. It works with the rows of the room your session is in.
In the practice room the page Tools also shows the section Drafts: tools that are not published yet. You only see drafts you are allowed to open.
What is shared
| Shared | Consequence |
|---|---|
| People | You are the same person in both rooms. |
| Roles and rights | Your rights are the same in both rooms. If you see only your own rows in production, you see only your own rows in the practice room too. |
| Access tokens | A token is valid for exactly one room. You fix it when issuing the token, see Access tokens. |
| Buckets | A bucket has the same name, the same limits and the same rights in both rooms. Only its files are kept per room. |
The structure exists only once, too: a collection has the same name in both rooms. New collections and fields are created in the practice room and apply in production only once the administrators transfer them, see Transferring from the practice room.
Pseudonyms in the practice room
When you work in the practice room in your browser, you see the real names of your colleagues. That lets you check whether a tool assigns things to the right person.
An agent with an access token for the practice room sees pseudonyms instead: a name like Person 7K3M and an address ending in @pseudonym.invalid. Mail to that address reaches nobody. The same person always carries the same pseudonym, and their identifier stays the real one. Assignments and the scope own therefore work as they do in production.