Published Release Notes

Create, Save As, and Specialization forms

The familiar “New” and “Save As” forms have been streamlined to make record creation faster and more intuitive. You can easily target a specific layer in your application stack, interactively define the record’s configuration and select only those circumstance definitions that make sense for your use case.

While the underlying behavior for creating a record is not new for this release, the redesigned UI of these forms and new defaulting strategy for fields is worth noting:

To launch these forms, use one of the new options found in the action area of the form header:

Note that not all record types support the ability to specialize by circumstance.

For more guidance on how to use the Create, Save As and Specialization forms, please refer to: Intuitive record creation and specialization

Redirect users to logout screen

New applications built in Version 7.1 will automatically redirect users to the PRPC login page upon logout.

A new template, Web-Session-Return-Template, has been added, to allow developers to customize their applications to redirect users to a logout page, if they wish.  This template can be copied to a ruleset visible to unauthenticated requestors (via node configuration) and used to override Web-Session-Return.

Source field not displaying in data transform

On the Data Transform rule form when using the Update Page action, if the Relation value is updated to “with values from”, the Source field will not be displayed.

(Note that for existing data transforms where the Source field has already been completed, this situation should not occur.)

Workaround

1. Below is a data transform that has been configured to use Update Page.
   
2. If a user were to choose an alternate source by updating the ‘with values from’ Relation value, they would not be prompted to provide a page name in the Source field.
   
3. At this point, to be able to enter the Source page value, the user has to save the rule, which results in an error because the source page value is blank. This causes the field to appear.
   
4. Once the field has appeared, the Source page value can be provided, and the form can be saved successfully.
   

Core Engine

This release contains fixes related to clipboard and declarative features, including data pages and autopopulate.

• A rule may be changed using Private Checkout, and then checked into a higher RuleSet Version for that RuleSet.
• Agents may now use a 24-hour time period for scheduling, as well as a 12-hour time period (which required the selection of AM or PM).
• Caching and performance have been enhanced.
• Declare expressions will work with embedded page lists when creating forms.
• Mandatory parameters on a data page can handle blank values.
• Properties may be auto-populated using a reference property which is created with a Property-Ref method in an activity.
• System will use "private edit" rules in developer's personal RuleSet when that rule overrides the "standard" rule available to all.
• The Page-Remove method will now remove Data Pages at the Thread level and the Requestor Level.
• When copying a page using the "Set" action on a data transform, the Declare Indexes defined on that data will be updated.
• When creating a data page, the Reload Once per Interaction checkbox can be checked to set the refresh strategy. 

Designer Studio

Many refinements to the Designer Studio were made around performance and user experience. Based on feedback, we have made a number of bug fixes and strategic improvements that improve the overall user experience.

• The Developer Portal connects to the PDN's RSS feed without needing a DigiCert certificate for validation. The RSS feed is just headlines; to open and read any of the articles, users will still have to log into the PDN.
• Expression Builder has been enhanced to work with IE8.
• New applications built in Version 7.1 will automatically redirect users to the PRPC login page upon logout. A new template has been added, to allow developers to customize their applications to redirect users to a logout page, if they wish.
• Performance improvements were made when saving and validating rules.
• Performance of the Guardrails Dashboard has been improved.
• The display of circumstanced rules in Application Explorer has been enhanced.

Unicode-enabled database for international language support

The Pega 7 Platform database has been enhanced to natively support Unicode multibyte character set encoding when using Postgres on Pega Cloud. This enhancement allows you to store data in languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Change the type of an existing field

You can now change the type of an existing field on the Data model tab of a case type or data type, resulting in a more efficient development process at design time. If there are any validation issues when changing a type, an error message is displayed, and the type cannot be modified by using this method.

For more information, see:

• Modifying the type of a field
• Troubleshooting validation errors when changing the type of an existing field

Open authoring for rule forms has been removed

Open authoring for rule forms has been removed. You can now edit decision tables and map values by using the application and supported browser of your choice; Microsoft ActiveX controls are no longer required. In addition, support for external XML, HTML, and Java IDE editors has been removed.

Pega Express application views simplify portal creation

Pega Express application views offer a simple, intuitive authoring experience for portals. Application view templates support responsive application development and offer mobile-specific templates. You can create portals by selecting from a predefined set of application view templates.

For more information, see Application views.

Rule form search

You can now search for content within some rule forms by clicking Search rule on the Actions menu. The search results and the tabs of the rule form that contain the search results are highlighted.

For example, you can find the properties that are used in a when condition inside an activity without navigating to each tab, when condition, transition, and method in the activity.