Building your first workflow? You might want to test your settings without affecting months of work. Here are three ways to do just that.
What does this article cover?
Create a test project with Unito
The best way to make sure none of your data is affected while you test out your flow is to create test projects. That way, you can see how it will affect your work items without actually changing anything that matters.
Some tools, like Asana, let you duplicate entire projects, that way you can re-create the exact circumstances of your use case. This is the best way to do it. Otherwise, you can always create a new project and populate it with placeholder tasks.
When you’re building your flow, make sure to use your newly created test projects when adding your blocks of work.
Note: If you’re completely new to Unito, you might want to start with a one-way flow. That’ll show you the functionality without having to manage too many projects at once. When you’re ready, you can easily turn your flow back to a two-way flow.
Try using manual flows
By default, each flow will automatically sync changes between tools. How frequently this happens depends on your plan. When you’re in your day-to-day work, this is how Unito is meant to work; you set up your workflows and we track changes in the background without your intervention.
But when you’re testing things out, you might not want every change to get synced automatically. If you want the freedom to tinker with your settings without affecting your work items, you can turn off Auto Sync when creating or editing your flow.
With auto sync turned off, you’ll have to manually trigger your flow. This means you can edit your flow without worrying that it will impact your work items. Once you’re ready to see your changes in action, just click Sync now.
Sync only new work items (tasks, tickets, spreadsheet rows, etc.)
When creating your flows, you might have noticed a pre-made condition in your rules that says: creation date on or after (today's date):
Selecting the trash can icon on the right-hand side will remove this condition.
This means that only work items (e.g., tasks, issues, contacts, etc.) created after you finish creating your flow will be synced. This is a safeguard that lets you test your flow before syncing historical work items. Once you remove it, Unito will sync all work items that match your rules.
To test the flow you've created, simply create a new work item and see if it syncs to the destination block (project, spreadsheet, calendar, etc.) you've connected with Unito. You can then remove this condition either in your rules, or by clicking "include older tasks" after launching your flow.
All Unito flows begin with the creation date condition for rules to help new users test their flow first without affecting historical work items.
When your flow settings sync work items the way you want them to, it's easy to edit your flow and turn off this option. Your flow's rules can then be applied retroactively to all work items in your connected blocks of work (projects, spreadsheets, calendars, etc.).