Published Release Notes

Access work items directly after login

You can now directly access work items that you receive as email notifications or URLs. The Pega 7 Platform opens the work item after successful user authentication instead of redirecting you to the portal. For a valid user, the type of authentication or number of failed login attempts does not affect this direct access.

For systems that use basic or secure basic authentication, administrators can disable the redirect URL by setting the authentication/basicschemes/redirectToLoginScreen switch to false.

Ability to restrict access to the Import wizard

You can now restrict access to the Import wizard so that users implement an automated pipeline to deploy changes between environments such as staging and production. Deployment Manager is one method by which to create pipelines. By using pipelines to propagate changes, users can apply a standardized and automated deployment process for migrating their applications.

For more information, see:

• Ensuring that users migrate applications with a pipeline by restricting the Import wizard
• Understanding model-driven DevOps with Deployment Manager

Open access to quiesced servers when using immediate drain

When using the immediate drain method to perform quiesce on a node, any operator can now access a quiesced server for root cause analysis or remediation, regardless of their user role or privileges. For quiesced server access when using the slow drain method, you must still include either the PegaRULES:HighAvailabilityAdministrator or PegaRULES:HighAvailabilityQuiesceInvestigator user role in a user's access group. Administrators using the slow drain method without either of these user roles are exiled from the quiesced node and are redirected to an active node.

For more information, see Immediate drain available for quiesce when using high availability.

Requestor pools management in Designer Studio

On the new Requestor Pools landing page, you can view and manage requestor pools across the cluster, including on the current node and remote nodes. By using this landing page, you can tune the requestor pools to improve the performance of services. You can clear the requestor pool for a service package and view the requestor pool basic metrics and configured thresholds.

For more information, see Requestor pools management, Clearing a requestor pool, Viewing details for a requestor pool, Tuning a requestor pool configuration.

Define function input parameters on the Create or Save As forms

When creating or updating a Rule-Utility-Function ruleset in Designer Studio, use the Create or Save As forms to define or change parameters as a part of the form. The Parameters section on either of these forms allows you to set the function's name and Java type before opening the function.

Previously, you updated these fields on the Parameters tab for the function after the form was created. Moving these fields to the Create and Save As forms helps to proactively detect functions with the same signature in the same ruleset before saving the function.

For more information, see Defining function input parameters on the Create or Save As forms.

Deploy in secured mode

Deploying the Pega 7 Platform in secured mode helps prevent unauthorized access to your system. By default, the Pega 7 Platform deploys in secured mode. For more information, see the Deployment Guide for your environment.

Run advanced agents on only one node in a cluster

You can now configure an advanced agent to run on only one node in a cluster at a specified time. In addition, you can specify the time interval within which an advanced agent runs on only one node in the cluster, which avoids having two advanced agents starting to run on the same node at the same time.

For more information, see Improved control for running advanced agents and Agents rules – Completing the Schedule tab.

Custom properties can be passed to an Oracle database

You can pass a customizable set of property values to an Oracle database when a connection is established so that an SQL statement can be run. This feature provides the ability to implement object-level security for data access from a Pega 7 Platform application by defining Virtual Private Databases (VPDs) on class tables that reference the information passed. For example, you could pass in an operator's branch office into the context of every query run against the Oracle database to ensure that the operator has access only to data that is applicable to the operator's branch.

This feature is available only for Oracle databases and for a Data-Admin-DB-Name instance that is not PegaRULES or PegaDATA, and has the same connection metadata (JNDI, URL) as PegaData.

See Passing custom properties to an Oracle database.

Improved Clipboard performance

Clipboard performance has been enhanced to use high-speed, read-only data pages, making processing faster. For some high throughput use cases, performance might be degraded. If performance is degraded, you can use a restricted feature set for a specific read-only data page by selecting Restricted feature set for high throughput on the Load management tab of the data page rule.

For information about unsupported features when using a restricted feature set, see High-speed data page support.

Improved application performance when responding to SOAP requests

When an application serves multiple requests, the contention placed on the ContextHash class is reduced because all threads can concurrently access the mHash instance variable, which improves performance. To experience this benefit, redeploy the prweb.war file for web tier deployment or redeploy the prpc_wls_jee4.ear file for e-tier deployment.