Toggle is a simple user interface control that allows the user to switch between two opposing states. It is ideal for changing settings, preferences, and other state-based functionality that needs to be updated in an on/off fashion. Toggle switches are generally a preferred control for mobile devices because they take up less screen real estate than two radio buttons and allow the user to visually see their current toggle state (either ON or OFF).
When using a Toggle in your application it is important to provide clear labels that describe what the switch will do when it is active as well as the state that it currently is in. It is also important to use high-contrast colors and consider societal and cultural implications for your users when selecting a color to represent the toggle state as these can impact how easy it is for users to understand and interpret the behavior of the control.
Depending on the complexity of your system and the number of toggles you have in production, modifying their configuration via static files can become cumbersome at scale. In many cases it becomes necessary to build out a separate admin UI or other type of configuration management system to ensure consistency in the toggles deployed across your product. In some cases, a change to the toggle configuration requires a restart of your application in order to implement the new state. This can significantly slow down the cycle time for validating a release and can impact your ability to get a fast feedback loop from your customers.
One way to reduce the amount of time it takes to deploy a toggle is to utilize a feature flag system which allows you to dynamically change the behavior of the toggle at runtime with a single request. A common way to do this is to expose an endpoint that will enable you to perform an in-memory reconfig of the toggle for a given cohort of your users. This method can dramatically speed up the cycle time for validating a release because it removes the requirement to manually re-deploy and test your release.
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