Published Release Notes

More visibility of your production level

You can now see the production level of your environment in a new gadget that is available in all Pega Platform™ workspaces. To ensure that you immediately recognize your current environment, you can give it a unique name that is displayed when you click the gadget. In addition to specifying your production level and environment name on the System form in Dev Studio, you can now specify those values on the System & nodes page in Admin Studio.

For more information on Admin Studio, see Modifying your environment name and production level.

For more information on Dev Studio, see Specifying the production level.

Facebook and Web Chatbot configuration in the preview console

When you develop a Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Facebook or Web Chatbot, you can now teach interactive bot conversations by chatting with the bot in the preview console and guiding the artificial intelligence algorithm to the right responses. This ability greatly accelerates conversation development and simplifies configuration, while providing the developer with more transparency in the mechanisms that produce specific responses.

For more information, see Simulating a conversation and building a chatbot runtime and Testing and building a chatbot from the preview console.

Support for rich user interface controls in IVA for Web Chatbot

You can now use rich user interface controls in Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Web Chatbot because Pega Platform™ includes a framework for advanced user interface controls. You can use a date picker control and add file attachments while chatting with the chatbot. These features provide a richer and more robust user experience and they help the user accomplish tasks more quickly without the need for complex validation messages.

For more information, see Use rich user interface controls in Web Chatbot.

Support for rich HTML text in IVA for Email

Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Email now supports rich HTML text in email conversations, which enhances the overall user experience. You can enable this option in the Email channel configuration in IVA for Email to display rich text in email conversations for case triaging. Natural language processing (NLP) analysis works flawlessly in scenarios for all email content that contains rich HTML text.

For more information, see Enabling rich HTML text in emails.

Multiple actions triggering during intelligent email routing

Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Email now supports triggering of multiple actions during the intelligent routing of incoming emails, which improves the artificial intelligence capability of IVA for Email so that it is more responsive to user input. For example, you can set up intelligent routing for an Email channel to trigger multiple actions, such as creating a case and automatically replying to an email for the content that you receive.

For more information, see Intelligent email routing, Configuring routing conditions for automatic email handling, and Setting up intelligent routing in Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Email.

Rule revalidation after updating properties without restarting nodes

When you update certain property attributes, such as a property's maximum length, rule types that reference the property might not reflect the change. You do not always have to restart nodes to revalidate the referencing rules when they cannot be resaved, for example, when they are in a locked ruleset. For Pega Platform™ 8.1 and later, for non-stream rules, such as activities, data transforms, and so on, use the reassemble API in Admin Studio or truncate the assembled classes table.

For stream rules, such as sections, harnesses, paragraphs, and so on, reassemble the rules and restart the nodes. For more information, see More about properties.

For previous versions of Pega Platform, use the System Management Application (SMA) to revalidate stream and non-stream rules.

Improved management of batch indexing

You can now cancel and check the status of a batch index process directly from the Search landing page in Dev Studio. The landing page now refreshes automatically every 10 seconds so that you can easily see the most recent status of the batch index process. Additionally, the reindex operation is now 20% faster than in previous versions. These features provide greater visibility into batch indexing and improve your ability to fix issues with a batch indexing process.

For more information about batch indexing, see Rebuilding search indexes from the user interface.

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Improved rich user interface controls in IVA for Web Chatbot

In Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Web Chatbot, you can use additional rich user interface controls, such as the time and date picker or a simple form, to help users accomplish tasks more quickly and to limit errors. IVA for Web Chat can now also display a welcome message in the chat window, for example, to inform the user about the person with whom they are chatting.

For more information, see Streamline conversations in IVA for Web Chatbot with rich user interface controls.

Upgrade impact

The new Ul controls for Web Chatbot are enabled by default upon upgrade. If you do not want the controls enabled, you must disable them.

Also, if you have changed the styles for the welcome message, you may need to make changes to the welcome message to incorporate the new areas in the bot conversation area (such as quick replies).

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

Existing channels will behave as they did previously, so you should determine whether you want to use the new UI controls. If you want to use the new Ul controls, configure the new design-time options.

If you have changed the default styles for the welcome message, review the new settings to ensure that the welcome message is configured properly. 

Changes in JSON results when checking the health of your system

Beginning with Pega Platform™ 8.2, the JSON results that are returned when you ping a Pega Platform instance have changed. JSON results now include node type and health information, including test name, status, state, and node ID. The following samples show JSON results from versions before 8.2 and as of 8.2.

JSON results for pre-Pega Platform 8.2:

{ "duration":"3954.448601", "count":"0" }

JSON results for Pega Platform 8.2 and later:

{"node_type":["WebUser"],"health":[{"last_reported_time":"2019-02-14T16:10:49.589Z","test_name":"Sample-Stream-Check","status":"success"}],"state":"healthy","node_id":"10.10.10_samplenode"}.

Improved performance for work ID generation

Work IDs are now generated in batches and managed with dynamic system settings. Batch-based ID generation improves performance and scalability, which reduces the time that it takes to migrate data to a Pega Platform™ application.

For more information, see Default dynamic system settings data instances.

Upgrade impact

In a multi-node environment, the new ID generation method can assign IDs that are not as sequential as in the previous method.

For example, in a 2-node cluster, the IDs could come in from each node in batches of 1000, resulting in successive Work objects having IDs that differ by 1000 (such as 1, 1001, 2,1002, 3, 1003). As more Work objects are created the gaps can get filled. However, there might still be gaps left in the generated IDs.  For example, if a node crashes or shuts down, some IDs would be missing, or if a node has given out 600 IDs from a batch of 1000 IDs, then 400 IDs would remain unused. In most situations, this should not be an issue. 

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

If you must have nearly sequential IDs or cannot accept gaps in IDs (and do not need the performance improvement), then you can change the dynamic system setting to disable the new ID generation method. 

The dynamic system setting for this feature is idGenerator/defaultBatchSize. The feature is enabled by default with a defaultBatchSize of 1000. To disable the feature, set the value to 1.