Zoho Creator Environments is an underdeveloped feature that is full of bugs

Zoho Creator Environments is an underdeveloped feature that is full of bugs

I have been using Zoho Creator for the past year and a half for developing and maintaining a custom business system for a client of mine. I want to start by saying, I think Zoho Deluge and Creator is general is a very powerful and useful tool. I have been able to do a lot of cool customizations to the system because of it.

However, I have not had a smooth experience using Environments, something  consider to be critical to maintaining and updating already live applications. Issues I have had:

  1. When migrating changes to one form -- changes that are independent of other components -- it will often force me to migrate changes to other forms and components, even when there are no dependencies whatsoever. This is an issue when I need to migrate fixes to bugs for a Production application while simultaneously working on other enhancements/updates that are not ready to migrate yet. It makes it very difficult to maintain and improve my app.
  2. Changes to Form Names/Form Links/Field Names do not always migrate properly. I have had to re-migrate several times in order to get the Form Links to actually update in Production. This often will cause issues for users, as they are unable to access these forms.
  3. Changes to field names breaks components of the live application. After a recent migration, some fields stopped defaulting initial values. This cause serious issues for my application, as there were scripts involving those default fields. I had to re-migrate 2 times in order for this is work again.
  4. My pivot chart for Payroll items stopped working after a recent migration. It won't properly filter based on my user filters of a specific field. Again, causing major issues. 
  Even when testing in Staging and Development, these issues arise when migrating to Production. Environments needs to be fixed for me to be able to properly rely on it.