Published Release Notes

Enabling security policies now requires current password

As part of Pega’s initiative to protect against malicious attacks, the change password dialog has been enhanced.  When Security Policies have been enabled for your system, new users or those with expired passwords will now be prompted for both their existing password as well as their desired new password.

For more details, review the Designer Studio > System > Settings > Security Policies landing page.

Case Management

This release had a focus on extending key capabilities to improve the ease of configuration based on early adopter feedback.  Improvements were made in run-time performance, especially in high volume situations with complex case configurations.  A series of cosmetic changes and fixes are included.

• The Wait shape now supports dynamic references.
• Issues were addressed with the CreatePDF and the CascadingApproval Smartshapes.
• Attachments have been improved.
• Issues with the Create Case Type functionality were addressed.
• The Pega Pulse functionality has been improved, including its performance.
• When auditing a work item, History is now the default tab.

Addition of Data Access Tab to access control policy condition rules

You can now select associations and declarative index classes when creating access control policy condition rules. The Column source field in the policy condition can now accept properties from available associations and indexes. For ease of reference, the selected associations and indexes are available on the new Data Access tab. 

Using the new tab, you can build complex authorization models in which access restrictions for a class depend on the attributes present in the associated and indexed classes, along with the attributes in the current class. For example, a project management application can now separately maintain project lists for each operator and use that information to restrict read/write access to unique projects.

The information available on the new Data Access tab reflects rule form changes, which are similar to the existing functionality of the Report Definition in the Application Data Model. 

For more information, see Creating an access control policy condition.

Improved processing of correspondence details

When you send correspondence, the system now does not update the pxSendDateTime property on the pxCorrSummary work page that belongs to pyWorkPage. In previous versions of Pega Platform™, after sending correspondence, the update of the pxSendDateTime property could cause errors when working with an application at run time. To prevent such issues, Pega Platform now includes a pyEnableCorrSummary when rule that, by default, is set to false. If your business scenario requires updating the pxCorrSummary work page, set the when rule value to true.

For more information, see:

• Notifying participants about events
• Approval by email
• Sending automatic emails from cases

Support for picklists with parameterized data pages in App Studio in Cosmos React UI

You can now use data pages with parameters to populate a property of the picklist type with filtered results in App Studio. For example, in a survey case type, you can use a parameterized data page to configure cascading drop-down controls in which the values in a secondary drop-down list are based on the value that the user selects in the primary drop-down list. With dynamically-sourced picklists, you get greater flexibility in configuring picklists, and users see more accurate values.

For more information, see link Dropdown control Properties — General tab.

Addition of Servlet Management

Pega Platform™ now has Servlet Management in Pega Cloud® Services, which provides a simple and secure way to make changes to Pega Platform servlet definitions.

Servlet Management provides Pega Cloud Service clients with solutions to manage servlet configurations with self-service options. This reduces the cycle time for delivering configuration changes in Pega Cloud Service installations while also improving upgrade reliability. 

For more information, see Servlet management.

Upgrade impact

Clients with no application servlet customizations will not experience an impact. If you upgrade from Pega Platform version 8.5 or earlier and, prior to the upgrade, the Pega Cloud team provided your application servlet customizations, then following the upgrade, you must manually add, remove, or modify your servlet customizations in your upgraded application using this servlet management landing page in Pega Platform.

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

To manually move your pre-upgrade servlet customizations as appropriate or add new ones to your upgraded application using the new servlet management landing page, follow the steps in Adding a servlet.

Cosmos React-UI supports custom authentication

Pega Platform™ now supports custom authentication in applications that use Cosmos React-UI. Depending on the needs of your users and the functionality of your application, you might need to write custom authentication schemes to meet specific requirements. 

Clients that use custom authentication in their applications can now take advantage of the Cosmos React-UI.

For more information, see Securing Cosmos React-UI applications.

Integration and security tab now divided into two tabs

The Integration and Security tab is now two separate tabs on the Application Definition form: Integration and Security. While the content of these two tabs are related, they function more effectively as separate tabs. The Security tab now includes the Authentication section, so you can add existing authentication services to your Application Definition to more effectively manage the security of your application. 

For more information, see Security tab of the Application Definition.

Questionnaires available in App Studio

App Studio now supports authoring questionnaires, which in previous releases of Pega Platform™ were known as surveys. You can create questionnaires, add question pages, and populate the pages with questions of different types so that you can collect the exact data that your business processes require. For more efficient data management and reuse, data objects from a data model now store answers to questions, instead of autogenerated properties. For example, when a customer provides a date of birth in a questionnaire, and your application stores the date as a data object, you can conveniently reuse that data object in related cases. For greater flexibility, both standard Pega Platform and Cosmos React applications support questionnaires, however, some question types are unavailable in Cosmos React.

For more information, see:

• Create questionnaires in a low-code way in App Studio (8.6)
• Creating a questionnaire

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