Visual Business Director data is automatically cleaned after a retention period expires
Valid from Pega Version 8.5
To avoid negative impact on system resources, such as memory and disk space, Pega Platform™ automatically cleans out collections data accumulated in Visual Business Director after the time period specified in the vbd/dataRetentionTimeout dynamic system setting.
Upgrade impact
In versions of Pega Platform earlier than 8.5, collections data was not automatically removed. From version 8.5, the data is removed after 465 days (15 months) by default.
What steps are required to update the application to be compatible with this change?
If the default data retention period does not meet your requirements, you can change it by editing the vbd/dataRetentionTimeout setting.
For more information, see "Configuring the data retention period for Visual Business Director" in the Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.5 Upgrade Guide on the Pega Customer Decision Hub product page.
Optimization check utility available for legacy strategies
Valid from Pega Version 8.5
Ensure that your strategies are compatible with the optimized strategy execution engine introduced in Pega Platform™ 8.1 by running a post-upgrade utility that checks strategies within your application for areas that you can optimize, for example, by reducing the number of page properties that are copied from one shape to another. Running the utility produces a report that you can use to plan the required updates to your strategies.
For more information, see Make your strategies compatible with the optimized strategy execution engine by using a check utility.
Uploading customer responses into adaptive models is no longer available
Valid from Pega Version 8.5
The option to train adaptive models by uploading a static list of historical interaction records has been deprecated in Pega Platform™ 8.5.
Upgrade impact
In versions of Pega Platform earlier than 8.5, it was possible to train an adaptive model by uploading historical data of customer interaction. After the upgrade to version 8.5, this option is no longer available.
What steps are required to update the application to be compatible with this change?
Use data from a report definition to train adaptive models. For more information, see Training adaptive models.
More flexibility for Date Time predictors in adaptive models
Valid from Pega Version 8.5
You can configure adaptive model predictors that indicate the amount of time that has elapsed since a particular event. In versions of Pega Platform™ earlier than 8.5, you could only specify the absolute date and time, for example, the date when a subscriber last visited one of your brick-and-mortar store locations. In Pega Platform 8.5, you can also indicate the amount of time that has passed, for example, the number of days since a subscriber purchased a new service plan.
For more information, see Adding a predictor to an adaptive model.
PegaWAI ruleset deprecated in 8.5
Valid from Pega Version 8.5
Accessibility functions that were contained in the PegaWAI ruleset are now integrated into the main Pega Platform™. Consequently, the user interface in your applications now features accessibility functions out of the box, so you no longer need to use the PegaWAI ruleset to ensure accessible behavior in your application.
For more information, see Building an accessible UI.
Tags disappear from Rich Text Editor source mode
Valid from Pega Version 8.5
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.