Published Release Notes

Tracked changes persist between client sessions

The Microsoft Word native change tracking feature persists between client sessions for specifications. Enable this feature to facilitate collaborative reviews of your specifications with project stakeholders.

Inserting your specification updates as tracked changes allows you to:

• Provide visible markup to the next reviewer.
• Correlate edits to a specific user and time.
• Generate documents that include markup and comments.

Local settings, such as the colors you specify for markup, do not persist between clients.

For instructions on how to prevent markup and comments from appearing in generated documents, see Advanced options for editing specifications.

Add multiple attachments at once

You can now add more than one attachment to a requirement or specification at a time, without closing the Add/Edit Attachment modal dialog box. Use the traditional browse method to upload an attachment or drag and drop a local file, based on your needs. View and access your attachments from the Application Profile landing page, Requirement form, or Specification form.

Plan projects using release data

Requirements and specifications can now be mapped to a target release and iteration within a specific release. Populating these fields allows you to set and publish a release schedule through worksheets generated by the Sizing wizard. Access these fields from the Application Profile landing page or by opening any requirement or specification.

The Release and Iteration fields as they appear in a specification and a corresponding worksheet

The Sizing wizard incorporates values from the Release and Iteration fields for specifications only.

Specification type extended for decisioning users

Specifications now support a Decision Strategy Manager (DSM) type. This allows you to map your specifications to a decisioning component, such as a strategy or model. After you select an appropriate subtype and provide relevant metadata, you can run the Sizing wizard to incorporate these details into project sizing worksheets.

DSM specification details as they appear in the Specification form and Sizing wizard output

You must have access to Decision Management rulesets to create DSM specifications. For more information on specification types, refer to the Details tab of the Specification form. To view all specifications in your application, filtered by type, refer to the Application Profile landing page.

Add collections as linked implementations

You can now identify a collection or individual steps within a collection as an implementation of a specification. Linking specifications to rules allows you to more accurately convey your application design to project stakeholders. Use the Specifications tab on the Collection form to create these links.

To see all implementations for a given specification, refer to the Application Profile landing page or the Implementations tab of the Specification form.

Add project branding to generated documents

The standard Word Template for specification descriptions is now extensible. Using a customized template allows you to brand your generated documents with project-specific elements.

Specialize the Rule-Application-UseCase.pySpecificationDescription rule to:

• Include relevant images such as company logos.
• Define static text.
• Insert dynamic elements by merging clipboard values into field codes.

Generated document with custom company logo

Refer to Advanced options for editing specifications for instructions on how to override this template.

Adaptive Decision Manager installation changes to support delayed learning

To support delayed adaptive learning, Adaptive Decision Manager (ADM) has been enhanced with database schema changes and no longer relies on Hibernate. This change has an impact in the way ADM is set up in the Decision Management service layer: the jdbc/admDataSource resource is now superseded by jdbc/adm7DataSource.

Additionally, Pega 7.1.7 further simplifies the ADM deployment by providing a single enterprise application or web archive:

• Single EAR deployment archive that can used when deploying ADM on IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic
• Single WAR deployment archive that can be used when deploying ADM on Tomcat and JBoss

Improved full text search

In Pega 7.1.7, Elasticsearch is used to provide full-text search functionality for rules, work, and data content, replacing the existing Lucene search functionality. In addition to providing search results two to five times more quickly than with Lucene Search, Elasticsearch is more scalable: with multi-threaded bulk and incremental indexing, it provides enhanced information about the search queue, the ability to host index files on multiple nodes, a more robust and expressive search parser, the ability to configure thresholds for alerts and search query time-outs, and automatic handling of replication and failover.

The search management user interface, where you can see length of queue and age of entries, which node hosts the search index, and where it is located.

After upgrading to Pega 7.1.7, the system administrator must manually migrate search functionality from Lucene Search to Elasticsearch. Note that during the switch-over and until the indexes are rebuilt, Lucene search continues to function and there is no interruption in search functions. For more information, see the Pega 7.1.7 Upgrade Guide.

Use JDBC 4 compliant drivers for better performance

For better performance, ensure that you are using JDBC 4-compliant drivers.  For more information on supported and non-supported JDBC drivers, please reference the Platform Support Guide.

Use Tomcat 7 for better performance

For better performance with a Tomcat web server, use Tomcat 7.

Tomcat 6 has a limitation that causes the server to treat the JDBC driver as if it were a JDBC 3-compliant driver, even if the system is using a JDBC 4-compliant driver. Customers using Tomcat will see better performance if they upgrade to Tomcat 7 and use a JDBC 4-compliant driver.