Published Release Notes

Improved resiliency and observability of email infrastructure

Pega Platform now has several enhancements to improve the resiliency and observability of its email infrastructure. With the following enhancements, you can improve service quality and reduce maintenance costs:

• Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud alerts notify you of connection timeouts and help you troubleshoot more quickly.
• Default values for email settings ensure that your email configuration is optimal and follows best practices.
• Email listeners automatically retry test connectivity upon start-up if the connection fails or authentication fails.
• Improved logging provides meaningful messages and log categorization to support debugging.

For more information, see List of events and notifications in PDC.

Improved support of browser actions in Cosmos React UI

Pega Platform™ applications that use the Cosmos React now maintain user settings for the duration of the session. For example, if a user applies filters and sorting to a table, and then opens a new document, the application retains the table settings when the user navigates back to the page by clicking the browser back button.

This change improves user productivity by reducing the need to repeatedly apply the same settings.

Improved modal dialog boxes

In Theme Cosmos applications, modal dialog boxes for case creation now support width customization. In addition to a bigger default width, the FlexModalTemplate format now includes the following CSS helper classes, which enable developers to adjust the width of dialog boxes:

• modal-width-1_5x – sets the minimum width to 960p.
• modal-width-2x – sets the minimum width to 1280p.
• modal-width-max-content – sets the minimum width to the maximum width of the content.

In this way, users can now more comfortably create entries that require more descriptive information, for example, bugs. In addition, the background of all modal dialog boxes is now translucent, which highlights the focus of the dialog box as the only active part of the UI.

For more information, see Modal dialog box.

Association of incoming emails with triage cases

Customer service representatives (CSRs) can now associate an email triage case with existing business cases or service requests. As a result, CSRs can respond more quickly to information about the same issue reported by customers several times. The system displays a list of related service cases for the same customer that CSRs can then associate or disassociate from the open email triage case in the Email Manager or Case Manager portal.

For more information, see Associating service requests with a triage case and Keep related incoming emails together for a triage case.

Decision tables authoring in App Studio

App Studio now supports the option to create decision tables that return values for a calculated field. For example, you can automatically calculate a life insurance rate for a customer by using a decision table that evaluates multiple factors, such as age, medical history, and current occupation. At run time, your application evaluates the values that the customer provides against the values in the decision table, and then responds with the most suitable result. By building decision tables in App Studio, you increase the flexibility of your low-code application and save time and resources, because a single decision table can provide results in multiple scenarios. You can also save and then reuse decision tables to speed up your application development even more.

For more information, see:

• Calculate values automatically in App Studio with decision tables (8.6)
• Calculating values with decision tables
• Authoring decision tables in App Studio

Additional connection pool parameters for JDBC URL external databases

For improved external JDBC URL database connection performance, Pega Platform™ now supports multiple Hikari connection pool parameters directly in the Data-Admin-DB-Name rule. Previously, Pega Platform supported a limited number of connection pool parameters to optimize your database connection using dynamic system settings (DSS). Now you can optimize your JDBC URL connection pool sizing to meet your traffic requirements through additional parameters without switching rules. Additional parameters include client-request parameters to maximize the connectivity to your external databases.

For more information, see Creating and updating external database instances with JDBC URLs.

Upgrade impact

During an upgrade to Pega Infinity™ release 8.6 and later, clients who previously specified their JDBC URL connection parameters through dynamic system settings (DSS) or prconfig file must delete the corresponding DSS or prconfig elements immediately after upgrade. The old parameters that you previously specified through DSS or the prconfig file override the equivalent parameters that you specified in the JDBC URL rule after your upgrade.

For more information about deleting your previous DSS or prconfig elements, see Deleting dynamic system setting connection parameters and Deleting connection parameters in the prconfig file.

Enhanced PEGA0104 alert

The PEGA0104 alert now includes the thread pool size, a list of activities that are waiting in the queue for a thread to become available, and details on how long it took to capture the thread dump.  By default, the alert also includes the thread dump.  You can disable the inclusion of the thread dump by changing the related configuration option. 

For more information, see PEGA0104 alert: Background tasks have exceeded a threshold time when attempting to acquire a thread from pool or executor.

Secure email threading mechanism in email bots

Pega Email Bot™ now uses a secure built-in threading mechanism to ensure that all email communication between customer service representatives (CSRs), customers, and other stakeholders is secure and organized in separate threads for a triage case. For this purpose, the system embeds a unique encrypted security code in the body of outbound emails that identifies related triage cases, service requests, and forwarded emails.

For more information, see Understanding email triage process and Use a secure threading mechanism for emails.

Enhanced Pulse gadget for Cosmos React

Together with the DX API, the Cosmos React component now provides an overlay in which users can quickly view and select the feed sources from which to view Pulse messages. Users can also add attachments to their messages, and remove the messages that they post. These enhancements improve collaboration and speed up case resolution. For example, a case worker can view only posts from particular cases, to quickly find a request for additional information about a case, and then provide necessary details by attaching a relevant document.

For more information, see Configuring Pulse feed sources for Cosmos React and Posting a message in Pulse.

Remote case types in App Studio

App Studio now supports remote case types for applications that you build on Cosmos React. With remote case types, you can create a case type inside one application, and then work on cases based on this case type in another, remote application. As a result, users can perform work from multiple applications on one screen without the need to switch between applications, which results in increased efficiency and faster case resolution.

For more information, see:

• Increase efficiency by sharing remote case types between applications (8.6)
• Remote case types