Check Performance Data - How question flow configs reach an environment

Journey question flows are JSON files in src/DfE.CheckPerformanceData.Web/Data/QuestionFlows/, named {WhatToChange}_{CheckingWindowType}.json. They are served from the release image in every environment, by FileSystemQuestionFlowClient, reading {ContentRootPath}/Data/QuestionFlows/.

Nothing else is needed. The Web SDK's default content glob includes **/*.json, so dotnet publish already places them at /app/Data/QuestionFlows/ in the container. A flow change therefore reaches an environment by the ordinary act of deploying the commit that contains it.

Why not blob storage

They used to be read from the question-flows blob container. That container was provisioned empty by Terraform (terraform/application/storage.tf), and the only thing that ever filled it was a seeding step gated on IsDevelopment() or SeedDevelopmentData=true — set only in review.yml and development.yml. QA, preproduction and production therefore held whatever somebody had uploaded by hand, if anything, and a config change did not reach an environment just by deploying it. The storage account also sets public_network_access_enabled = false, so a pipeline runner could not upload into it either.

That drift was load-bearing in a bad way: it is the stated reason journey date rules (Application/Journey/DateRules/) are written in C# rather than declared in the flow JSON.

What this costs

A flow cannot be hotfixed without a redeploy. Nothing edits these at runtime — there is no admin flow editor, and the interface (IQuestionFlowConfigSource) is read-only — so today that costs nothing.

If a storage-backed source is ever wanted again

Wanting one means wanting business users to edit flows without a deploy. In that case do not reinstate a plain seed-if-missing upload: it freezes each environment at whatever landed first, which is the original bug. Copy the version gate from Infrastructure/RulesEngine/RulesConfigSeeder.cs — a version field in each config, the bundled copy replacing the stored one only when it is strictly newer, admin saves stamped so they outrank the bundled seed. QualificationReferenceSeedingService is the simpler precedent for a hosted service that runs in every environment.

The question-flows container has been removed from terraform/application/storage.tf. Terraform deletes the container on the next apply in each environment, along with any configs that had been uploaded to it by hand — that content is superseded by the files in the image, but it is gone, not archived. Recreating the container means re-adding it to the containers list; the blobs would have to be re-uploaded from Web/Data/QuestionFlows/.