Give informative and descriptive names to the records that you create in Pega Platform, such as rules and data instances, to help you manage your resources and provide quick context for other developers. As a result, you speed up application development and promote reuse across your application.

To save time and ensure that your projects adhere to the unique needs of your clients, create rules and data instances using reusable elements of your application. By combining a rule type, name, class, and ruleset, you provide a unique identity for each rule that you create.

For an improved management of your application, organize its building elements – rules – in a logical and coherent way. You can group rules into rulesets and classes, so that you can conveniently reuse them during application development. As a result, you reduce development time and costs.

Rule resolution is the search algorithm that the system uses to find the best or most appropriate rule instance to apply in a situation.

Adjust your application to your specific business needs by changing scope of rules. For example, you can move a rule to another ruleset or class, so that you can reuse the rule in a different part of your application.

To avoid accidental rule changes or conflicts that might result from multiple developers working on the same rule, perform a check out, so that you can lock the rule and safely make changes to it. By checking a rule out before editing, you avoid unwanted rule changes, and as a result save time and maintain a better quality application.

During application development, you can undo recent changes to a rule and replace the current rule with a previous copy, even if another developer created the newer copies.

Find sections that use deprecated rules by using an application upgrade utility. Once found, these legacy rules can be updated to newer rules.

To ensure that your application includes all the features that your business process requires, explore rules that define these features. By exploring rules before you define new elements of your app, you can also avoid duplicating resources, and as a result, save time and development costs.

To delegate a rule or data type to enable your business line to configure simple application logic without involvement from IT, complete the following steps.

Applications that require deprecated rules that are no longer included in the Pega Platform distribution need to import those legacy rules from the Resource Kit.

Provide the data necessary to process your cases by referencing information in the form of properties. When you refer to a property, your application calls a specific piece of information, such as a customer phone number or an address.

Your teams can develop multiple features simultaneously without overwriting work and causing conflicts by implementing branched application development. During branched development, developers can make changes in one ruleset that affect other developers only after you merge the changes into a target ruleset. As a result, you speed up application development and can clearly analyze what changes your application includes.

An incorrect rule configuration in an application can cause delays in case processing. To avoid configuration errors such as incorrectly routed assignments, unit test individual rules as you develop them. To expedite future rules testing, you can create reusable test cases from the unit test.

Save time during application development by reusing elements such as relevant records and components.

To provide automated solutions for your application users, define automatic was of making decisions and calculating values in your business processes.

To save time and reduce the risk of errors during calculation, provide tools for your application that calculate and validate values in an automatic way.

Automate a system task for which a more appropriate rule type is not available by creating an activity. With activities, you define a sequential set of instructions, or steps, that the activity completes automatically. Each step calls a method or supported rule type to perform the required processing.

Enhance and customize your application by creating a binary file rule that in a form of a rule stores a graphics file, such as an image, or other non-text files. Binary file rule type provides the security, inheritance versioning, and deployment benefits of rule resolution to a file.

Customize the look-and-feel of your application by including your own images in elements such as logos, displaying an image for a button or link control, using custom sprites in the UI design, and determining the content that users see when the system displays a guardrail warning. As a result, you provide a unique and personalized application that can precisely reflect your business requirements.

To enable or disable functionality that is under development, or to control access to a feature, create a toggle. When you create a toggle, a when rule for the toggle instance is created by default.

You run a preflight optimization to reduce an application’s unnecessary static content and improve its loading time.