In software, toggle refers to switches that allow you to change the state of something. Examples include the Caps Lock and Num Lock keys on a keyboard.

When it comes to software applications, toggles are often used in options menus and trigger events. In Storyline 360, we’ve introduced a new way to do this with Toggle hidden/disabled state triggers.

If you’re familiar with HTML radio buttons, this is a lot like the concept. The only difference is that toggles are only active when they’re in the hidden or disabled state.

This approach is great for things that don’t change very frequently or which have no impact on the running system. But it can get pretty fiddly as the number of toggles increases.

Savvy teams view the toggle configuration as inventory that comes with a carrying cost and seek to keep that inventory as low as possible. As a result many organizations move toggle configuration into some type of centralized store, often an application DB.

Once that store has been built out the challenge becomes maintaining a consistent set of toggles across a large fleet of servers. This can be a very frustrating experience.

The solution is to add runtime configuration support to your toggle system which allows you to override the default state of a feature flag at runtime. This can save a lot of time during the validation process. It also helps ensure that toggles don’t end up causing you to start up the whole test environment just to flip them.