Testing
The Understory API is a powerful extension to your business and we know how important it is to test things before enabling a new integration.
To test out your integration you can create a dedicated set of credentials for your Understory account or you can create a dedicated test account. Each of these approaches has pros and cons. Consult the sections below to decide what best fits your needs.
Test credentials
Creating new credentials with limited scopes is straightforward in the Integration Keys section of your Understory Account Settings. This is useful for testing read-only operations as you can access your actual data like experiences, events, and bookings.
As read operations cannot change anything in Understory, you can test around with confidence that nothing will stop working based on your integration.
To learn more about creating new credentials see the Authentication and be mindful of only selecting read permissions when creating the credentials.
Dedicated testing account
If you are building a more complex integration and want to test end-to-end flows, e.g. complete bookings, we recommend creating a dedicated Understory account just for testing purposes. From there you can create specific experiences and events and safely complete free bookings without affecting your business.
Be aware that we currently do not support connecting payment providers in test mode, e.g. Stripe's testing environments. That means that you are currently limited to only using free experiences. This way you avoid having to manage real money and transactions.
To create a dedicated account, go and Sign up to Understory and follow the Quickstart tutorial to get started.
Summary
The below table summarises each approach and its limitations.
| Test credentials | Dedicated account | |
|---|---|---|
| Access | Read-only is recommended | Read and write |
| Data | All your data | Only the data you create for testing |
| Sharing | Developers need access to your Understory team | Developers only have access to data they create |
| Payments | If write permissions are granted, you can create bookings and handle real money | Only free experiences are available |