Toggle – Managing Toggle Configuration

Toggle is a digital trade journal highlighting the vital role technology plays in companies and organizations across the world and the men and women who make it happen. We focus on the key challenges CIOs and CTOs face in a dynamic IT landscape, from data privacy and cybersecurity to cloud solutions and artificial intelligence.

Toggles can be used to hide or show article sections, containers, images, maps and more. They can be activated by clicking the eye icon in a page’s presentation view, and are only visible to the owner of the toggle. To reveal hidden content again, the toggle needs to be switched back on.

There are a number of ways to manage toggle configuration, from static files that offer simple but less dynamic options through to preprocessor features which can offer a little more sophistication but require you to follow a pattern for deploying code in order to change the toggle state (for less dynamic flags at least). In most cases though the best option is to move toggle configuration into some type of centralized store, usually an existing application DB. This also offers the benefit of providing an admin UI that system operators, testers and product managers can use to modify the toggle state.

Using toggles in this manner helps support newer agile approaches by allowing you to release software while your team writes and tests user-requested features on code branches that can remain hidden behind feature toggles until they’re ready for release, market testing or whatever the next stage of development might be. Just remember to prune old toggles from your production codebase as soon as they’re no longer required.