Published Release Notes

Extended currency control

The currency control can now display a different currency than the locale currency. This means a user in one country can view amounts that are designated in a foreign currency, using that currency's international conventions.  For example, a credit card transaction in Germany might need to be posted in US dollars. 

Improved accessibility support

PRPC support for accessibility has been enhanced to allow applications to better meet the standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), 2.0 AA. 

Data Visualization controls are now available

Use a Data Visualization control when you need a highly configurable visualization beyond the standard pie, bar, and line charts. With a Data Visualization control, you can appropriately represent any type of data. You can add Data Visualization controls to sections or anywhere else a standard control can be used, such as dashboard widgets.

For more information, see Adding and configuring a Data Visualization control.

Improved access to Cosmos UI settings

The Settings tab in the App Studio case designer now includes tools for configuring Cosmos UI. With this enhancement, you can adjust design system settings without the need to specialize individual When rules in Dev Studio, which simplifies UI creation and saves development time.

For more information, see Managing Cosmos UI settings in case designer.

Custom DX API attributes for auto-generated controls

Auto-generated controls now include the option to add custom attributes for use with the Pega Digital Experience (DX) API. The attributes are part of the DX API response to the front end and you can use them to modify the run-time behavior of the UI elements in your application. For example, you can add an attribute to a field that displays a tooltip text for that field at run time. This enhancement introduces significant flexibility to application development and gives you greater control over UI components.

For more information, see Adding custom attributes for version 1 DX API to auto-generated controls.

Support for controlling binary file upload in Pega Mobile Client

The Client Store API of Pega^® Mobile Client has been modified so that you can suspend and resume the process of uploading binary files to the server. You can also check the state of the file uploading process. As a result, custom mobile app users can process their work items without having to wait for the synchronization process to finish.

For more information, see Pega Mobile Client API methods for controlling binary data upload and Client Store API.

VTable dispatch mechanism for HTML control execution improves performance

Pega® Platform now uses an optimized VTable dispatch mechanism to manage rule execution for the Text Input and Formatted Text Input controls. This change improves performance by eliminating the dependency between stream rules and HTML controls during rule assembly. Disabling this feature will have a negative effect on performance and is not recommended. However, you can disable this feature by adding the following configuration parameter:

Name: assembly/section/control/vtable
Value: false

PegaWAI ruleset deprecated in 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.

Specify styles at run time in Pega Express

At run time in Pega^® Express, you can now apply styling to many controls. Styling options vary from one control to another. For example, when you style a Dropdown control, you can specify text color, background fill and color, and border width and color. When you style controls directly in Pega Express, rather than switching to Designer Studio to modify the application skin, you can save development time.

For more information, see Styling controls at run time in Pega Express.

Tamper-proof Pega Web Mashup loading

To protect your application from hackers, Pega Web Mashup is now loaded in a more secure way. The system generates a channel ID in the mashup code for validation on the server, before passing the mashup request. 

For more information, see Creating a mashup.

Upgrade impact

After an upgrade to Pega Platform 8.5, existing mashups, which do not have the channel ID parameter in their code, cannot load and users see the access control warning.

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

If you need to maintain full availability of the mashup during the upgrade of the production environment, perform the steps in Migrating existing mashups.