Published Release Notes

Support for additional health metrics on the Application Quality landing page

On the Application Quality landing page, you can monitor the health of your current application to identify areas that need improvement before deployment. The landing page provides application metrics such as the number of executable rules, the guardrail score, the number of guardrail warnings, the test coverage percentage, and the pass rate of PegaUnit tests. From this landing page, you can also view data for the entire application, for each of its cases, and for rules that are not part of any case type.

For more information, see Application Quality landing page.

View the configuration settings for Pega Platform nodes in Designer Studio

On the new Configuration Settings landing page, you can view a list of the configuration settings for a specific node, current or remote, or for an entire cluster. From this landing page you can diagnose settings issues, determine whether settings are loaded correctly, and review the settings' purposes. You can also download the prconfig.xml file for any node in a cluster to modify the settings. The ability to view settings for all nodes in the Cluster from a single landing page makes diagnosing configuration issues across the cluster simpler and easier than logging on to each node individually to view its system settings. For example, if a started agent does not run, you can check if agents are enabled on your system; or if some of your caches are too big, you can check the setting for the cache size. You can also determine if settings are loaded correctly, and identify discrepancies in the settings across the nodes.

For more information, see Viewing the current configuration settings of a node or the whole cluster, Downloading and viewing the prconfig.xml file for a specific node, REST APIs for viewing the configuration settings for Pega Platform.

Support for templated auto responses during email triaging of interaction cases

When you triage an interaction case by email, you can now select a predefined email response to provide feedback to a customer more quickly. The category that is associated with this email determines the type of responses that you can select. You can create an email response template or use an existing template.

For more information, see Defining suggested replies for the Email channel.

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.

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.

Pulse enhancements

The enhanced layout of the Pulse interface provides a better user experience for posting messages, adding attachments, bookmarking content, and so on. You can now post messages in your activity feed, format messages, add inline images and links to messages, reference cases, and view the list of users who like messages. The Pulse email templates have also been improved to display email content in a coherent and structured format.

For more information, see:

• Pega Express 7.4 – Communicating with Pulse
• Pega Platform 7.4 – Pulse enhancements for social collaboration

Pega API available in Pega Express

The Pega^® API is now included on the Channels and Interfaces dashboard in Pega Express. You can configure Pega APIs to access Pega application functionality directly from Pega Express without switching to Designer Studio.

For more information about channel interfaces, see Channels and interfaces. For more information about the Pega API.

Ability to connect to REST data sources in Pega Express

You can now connect to REST data sources in Pega^® Express to see REST data in your application without leaving the end-user portal. Connecting to a REST data source is similar to testing an endpoint. You enter the endpoint URL, test the endpoint, and start using the data source. REST data sources in Pega Express are high performing because they use the new JSON data transform to directly map to the data page without requiring integration classes and properties.

For more information, see Adding a data type for remotely stored data by using REST.