Published Release Notes

Pega Platform ends support for Java 7

Oracle has ended support for Java 7 and is no longer issuing security patches for Java 7. Therefore, starting with Pega 7.4, Pega® Platform no longer supports Java 7. For more information about supported platforms, see the Platform Support Guide. For more information about Oracle support for Java 7, see the Oracle documentation.

Improved operator security

To improve security, Pega® Platform now requires the following:

• During deployment, you must configure a password for [email protected].
• The administrator must enable new out-of-the-box operators.
• The administrator and new Pega-supplied operators must change their passwords after the first login.

These requirements replace the optional secured mode in earlier versions of Pega Platform.

Aggregating and browsing Visual Business Director data set

Visual Business Director (VBD) data set has been enhanced to support the Aggregate and Browse operations. Aggregating aids testing your data in Pega^® Visual Business Director. Browsing the content of the Visual Business Director data set provides transparency and helps to troubleshoot issues that are related to Pega Visual Business Director. You can use the new operations from the DataSet-Execute method or by clicking Actions > Run in the Visual Business Director data set form.

For more information see Creating a Visual Business Director data set record and Configuring the DataSet-Execute method for Visual Business Director.

Submit application changes made in Pega Express to a continuous integration and delivery pipeline

After you make changes to your application in Pega^® Express, you can submit these changes into a continuous integration and delivery pipeline that is configured in Deployment Manager. By using Pega Express to submit your application changes into staging, preproduction, and production systems, you can quickly start builds without involvement from IT.

For more information, see Starting a continuous delivery build.

Simulate business changes in Customer Decision Hub

Running business simulations in Pega^® Customer Decision Hub has been simplified. You can create, configure, run, and schedule simulations to assess the effect of business changes. Creating a simulation test requires minimal configuration and has greater flexibility for the business user who can now define multiple destinations or assign different types of reports to assess the effect of the simulated changes.

For more information, see Simulations in Customer Decision Hub and Simulation testing.

Enhanced adaptive model reporting

The new Model report replaces the Behavior and the Performance overview reports to improve report usability and provide consistent information. You can export your Model reports into PDF or Excel files to view or share them outside the Pega® Platform. The Model report also includes information on the groups of correlated predictors where the best performing predictor from each group is active in the model and other remain inactive; this information helps you understand why predictors are active or inactive.

For more information, see Generating a model report.

System state data is saved for 90 days

System state data is now saved to the database for 90 days and can be downloaded as a JSON file. Having previous system state data available is useful for debugging system problems. Operators with the pzSystemOperationsObserver privilege can download system state data from the Cluster Management landing page for either the entire cluster or a single node. In addition, the PersistClusterState and PersistNodeState agents have been added to the Pega-RulesEngine ruleset for persisting system state data to the database.

For more information, see Downloading the system state.

Ability to run report definitions against an Elasticsearch index

To improve report generation performance, you can now run report definitions against Elasticsearch indexes instead of using SQL queries directly against the database. This feature is disabled by default and does not apply to reports that have features that are not supported by Elasticsearch. If a report query cannot be run against Elasticsearch indexes, Pega^® Platform automatically uses an SQL query.

For information about enabling and using this feature, see Configuring a report definition to run against an Elasticsearch index.

Search index fields can retain the original property type

You can now configure fields in the search index to retain the property type of the original property. By default, properties in an indexed class are converted to a string before they are placed in fields in the search index, referred to as a typeless index. Type-aware search indexes let you run report queries with filters, date calculations, and aggregations directly in the query. To configure a class to have type-aware properties, use a dedicated index.

For more information, refer to Custom search properties.

Support for the WebChat conversational user channel

You can now embed standard chat capability on any website by creating the WebChat channel interface as the Pega^® Intelligent Virtual Assistant. Users can communicate with a Pega Platform application, for example, to open a case to report a problem or to display a menu of commands to ask for assistance. The WebChat channel does not require any additional accounts or third-party installations, and you have full control over the end-to-end communication.

For more information, see Configuring the WebChat channel.