Starting with the next release after Pega Platform™ 8.2, passing symbolic indexes as strings in parameters, properties, and string literals to both value lists and page lists will no longer be supported. The following example shows the syntax that still works in Pega 8.2, that will not work in the next release:

myPageList("<LAST>")

and

param.str = "<LAST>"
myPageList(param.str)

The following example shows syntax that currently is not supported and gives a validation error. This syntax will also not work in future releases.

param.str = <LAST>
myPageList(param.str)

To avoid issues after upgrading to Pega 8.3, refactor all occurrences of this syntax in your code. You can refactor the syntax using Pega-supplied functions such as sizeOfPageList to obtain the size of the page list, which can be used as the index selector.

Finding occurrences of the unsupported syntax

To find all occurrences of this syntax in your code, use the FindingSymbolicidxReferredAsString.zip file located in the Product Resource section in Related Content below. This file contains a RAP with the following activities that you can use to find activity and data transform rules that use symbolic indexes as string:

• pyGatherDataForActivity – This activity checks for symbolic indexes used as string in all of the activities in Pega-specific rulesets.
• pyGatherDataForModel – This activity checks for symbolic indexes used as string in all of the data transforms in Pega-specific rulesets.

To use the .zip file:

1. Download the .zip file.
2. Unzip the file and import the RAP. For more information about importing a RAP, see Import wizard.
3. Modify the activities to browse your application. For more information, see Activities.
4. Run the activities in your application.
5. Open the PegaRULES.log file to view the rules that use symbolic indexes as string. For more information, see Viewing logs.