Steps cannot be copied and pasted when the instance changes.

Hey Masako,

Thanks for the feedback. I can imagine having to manually replicate the flow in another instance would be very time consuming especially if you have a large flow. To help me understand this problem better, can you please share the use case on what you're trying to achieve with the copy of the flow in the sandbox environment? 

Lisa Tam

Thanks for noticing my comment.

It's a simple story.
I want to take a single branded flow that I created in the sandbox and paste everything directly into production.
Currently, I can't paste between the sandbox and production (although I can copy).

The size of the flow is large and complex.

Hey Masako, 

Thanks for sharing this insight around how you manage the bots build lifecycle between the different environments. I will log this feedback for us to take into consideration in future.

We do have some plans to improve the bot build-test lifecycle within an instance by introducing an interactive previewer where you can test the bot from the lens of an end-user. So if a change is made on the production instance, admins can test the bot first prior to publishing. Could this help you with your use case around updating and testing the bot?

Lisa Tam

A interactive viewer might be a good idea.

What we would like, however, is for flows to be able to be copied and pasted bidirectionally between the sandbox and production.
Or, it would be nice if the flows modified in the sandbox could be automatically reflected in any production flow (I firmly refuse to automatically publish production flows).

I have the same request, it would be nice to build out and test your flows in the sandbox, ESPECIALLY since its so hard to make changes after they are published, and then to be able to copy the latest working version from the sandbox into production, rather than rebuild the entire thing

Here is an additional use case for this thread:

We've rebuilt our bot flow from the ground up to improve the experience we're offering customers and to incorporate more features than the original basic flow we built. We've decided to build this in sandbox so that multiple people across the business can have input - such as copywriters. Building in sandbox allows us to test this too by pushing it live and running test chats from the sandbox help centre. There is no disruption to our agents actively working as this doesn't touch production at all. Obviously now it'll be frustrating for us to put this in to production and manually re-build this.  

I will add to this.

We're trying to test some very complex flows in our Sandbox, and as part of the exercise I am copying the most complicated one into our Sandbox from production. Our aim was to build in the Sandbox, test, then copy into production - but the paste step doesn't work between these two. This seems nonsensical, as to use the sandbox for test, I then have to completely rebuild the flow in prod.

The preview doesn't really help, as we don't have messaging enabled in production yet until we've tested, made sure it works, and incorporate it into our app - which adds another use case for this: those who want to use the sandbox to thoroughly test messaging in conjunction with the bot before putting live into an application on a 1:1 basis.

It has been almost a year since I submitted my request and I am very distrustful of whether they are trying to take action or pretend it never happened.

Hello Lisa Tam - any update with this feature request? 

We have the same case with 小林正左子 wherein we configured the bot flow in Sandbox and need to push to production. We know for a fact that we manually need to do this but the fact that you can't even copy and paste the BOT flow from one tab to another. 

Hi @lisa35 , we are requesting the bot flow to be able to be copied and pasted bidirectionally between the sandbox and production.

This request has passed then 2 years around 3 years, and still don't have any solution. 

Hi Team!

I came here looking for the same thing :) Would be super useful because we effectively have a staging website where we want to publish the bot used in our sandbox Zendesk instance, before then updating our production Zendesk instance with the updated flow.

Being able to copy flows between instances would be amazing. Thanks!