Test before integrating configs

Before integrating existing config updates into your application, test the updates in a Development environment:

  1. In the Sensible app, click Publish configuration and choose Development to save your updates to a development environment.
  2. To test your updated config, specify development for the Environment parameter in your API or SDK extraction calls.

Environment fallback behavior

When you specify ?environment=development in an API endpoint, Sensible falls back to the production version for each configuration if it can't find a development version.

To understand fallback behavior, imagine the document type test_doc_type has the following config versions, which fit a document_a with varying degrees of accuracy:

ConfigVersion in prodVersion in dev
configAbest fitbad fit
configBOK fitno published version

If you specify ?environment=development, Sensible searches for a best fit across both production and development by comparing:

  • configA in development (bad fit)
  • configB in production (OK fit)

And returns output from configB (OK fit) in production. Notice that even though the API call specifies the Development environment, the call returns output from a production config because of fallback behavior.

If you don't specify an environment, Sensible ignores development versions and compares:

  • configA in production (best fit)
  • configB in production (OK fit)

And returns output from configA (best fit) in production.