Published Release Notes

Tabbed templates in portal authoring

Portal authoring in Pega Platform™ now includes tabbed templates that provide you with the tools to build complex user interfaces with less effort. The new templates help you save screen space and display the contents of your application in smaller, meaningful chunks.

For more information, see Configuring a tab-based landing page.

Update to Intelligent Virtual Assistant official names

To use better and more consistent names for conversational channels in Pega Platform™ and to help distinguish conversational channels from Pega Unified Messaging Edition™, Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Unified Messaging is now called IVA for Digital Messaging. Furthermore, the IVA for Web Chatbot is now officially called IVA for Legacy Webchat.

For more information, see Creating a Digital Messaging channel and Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant features.

Ability to train the text analytics model based on email attachments

You can now train the text analytics model for Pega Email Bot™ based on training data from email attachments. As a result, you improve the natural language processing (NLP) analysis for your email bot so that your system detects the correct language, sentiment, topics, and entities from both the body of emails and their attachments. By default, you train the text analytics model based only on training data from the body of emails.

For more information, see Enabling training the model based on email attachments.

Upgrading to the secure threading mechanism for email bots

In Pega Platform™ version 8.6, Pega Email Bot™ includes a more secure threading mechanism to help track emails from customers and other stakeholders in separate threads for an email triage case.

Upgrade impact

If you upgrade from Pega Platform version 8.5 or earlier, in which you configured an Email channel, perform the following steps to ensure that your system uses the new secure threading mechanism:

• Update the service email rule that the system uses to send an email reply as the initial acknowledgment.
• Update the email reply template in the data transform rule that the system uses when a customer service representative (CSR) sends the reply.

For more information about creating an initial acknowledgment email and email reply template, see Creating outbound email templates. For more information about the secure threading mechanism, see Use a secure threading mechanism in emails.

What steps are required to update the application to be compatible with this change?

For the initial acknowledgment email used by your email bot, update the service method for your email listener rule. On the Response tab for this service email rule, expand the Message contents section. In the Message data section, you specify the rule that defines the structure of the content of the email body. In Pega Platform version 8.6, you use for this purpose the pyEmailAcknowledgement correspondence rule that takes into account the selected built-in template. This template includes the security code tag that the system uses for the secure threading mechanism. If your application uses a different rule in the Message data section, update this definition to match one of the built-in correspondence template rules, for example, EmailAckTemplate_Clear.

The pySetEmailBotReplyTemplate data transform rule sets the name of the email correspondence rule that the system uses as the email reply template. If you do not want to use the default approach using the Classic, Cobalt, or Clear outbound email template themes, override this data transform rule to set the email correspondence rule name for the Param.ReplyTemplate target in the Source column field.

For more information about how to update the service email rule and the data transform rule to ensure that your system uses the secure threading mechanism, see Upgrading to the threading mechanism available in the 8.6 version.

Embedded properties in DX API v2 requests are no longer removed

In Pega Platform version 8.5, when you use the POST and PATCH v2 DX API methods with an embedded page property included in the content element of the request, the system removes all properties in the embedded page that are included in the case but are not a part of the request. Now, the merge logic has been modified to update embedded page fields sent up in the request, and keep other fields unchanged.

This feature simplifies client code and prevents data corruption.

Handlebars library update

Pega Platform version 8.6.4 uses the 4.7.7 version of the Handlebars template to generate client-side template files. The updated version, which is the latest available, introduces a wide variety of security fixes and new features that improve application reliability.

Tags disappear from Rich Text Editor source mode

When you use Rich Text Editor in HTML source mode, some tags disappear from the markup, which causes backward compatibility issues and data loss.

Cause

Pega Platform™ version 8.5.5 introduced the DOM Purifier security plugin. The plugin removes potentially vulnerable tags, including custom tags, from the raw HTML code in the Rich Text Editor source mode.

Workaround

You can disable the DOM Purifier plugin by adding the the window.disableDomPurifier = true markup to the userWorkForm HTML fragment rule.

Alternatively, as of Pega Platform version 8.5.6, you can add a tag to the allow list by including the window.rteCustomAllowedTags = ['myCustomTag'] snippet in the userWorkForm HTML fragment rule. 

In Pega Platform versions 8.5.6 to 8.6, the iframe tag is added to the allow list by default.