Published Release Notes

Offline mobile apps require Dynamic Container to use frameless Single Document mode

You can add a Dynamic Container (DC) directly into a Dynamic Layout cell. When creating a custom mobile app with offline capability, you must use the frameless Single Document mode of DC.

Note that mobile offline capability does not support using a framed Single Document mode.

Support for large reference data in offline mobile apps

A data page in a Pega 7 Platform mobile application with offline capability enabled can now be marked as a large data page. This feature improves performance significantly when you have a large amount of data in which only individual records change.

In this situation, after the initial sync to the mobile app, only the changes in the large data page are synced instead of the entire large data page. The database table is created for such large data pages in the encrypted SQLite database on the device. Changes such as add, delete, or update are reconciled as row-level updates. Furthermore, you can use JavaScript to query against this data. A large referenced data page is supported by list-based components such as repeating dynamic layout, auto-complete, a dropdown list, and radio button.

Support for offline and online cases in a single mobile app

A single offline-enabled application can now support both the creation and processing of online-only and offline-ready cases.

For online-only cases, a list of both the offline and online cases is always available. Case assignment and processing is performed on the server so that a case is available only when the device is connected to the Internet or to data. When a connection is not available for processing an online-only case, an error message is displayed.

For offline-ready cases, a user can open an assignment and perform tasks on that case. There is also an option to explicitly display a harness from a server instead of a client store.

Offline mobility improvements

Several offline mobility improvements have been made in this release. Additional use cases have been added for configuring offline-enabled mobile apps at design time. Read-only grids with limited features are now supported offline. You can configure auto-populated properties, and you can create work with parameters. It is also possible to open work by handle. You can use decision shapes with Boolean expressions (no when rules) in screen flows. Barcode scanning is now available in offline mode.

Mobile user interface updates

Several improvements have been made to the mobile-related user interface of the Pega 7 Platform. The content of the Mobile tab on the Application rule form has been redesigned. The Offline Configuration and Mobile Certificates landing pages are now available. The Signature Capture control has improved. Post-processing can now occur after the signature has been captured. You can auto-submit with the form submit. You can apply the signature to a page instead of applying it as an attachment to the case. The clear action completely removes the signature from the work object, keeping only the latest iteration of the signature. Touch interactions have been significantly improved. Response time is faster and there is better feedback on the touch action.

Improvements to email case triaging

Improvements to Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Email make the system more robust and user friendly. When you reply to emails in a triage case, you can forward the email, reply to all, and use the carbon copy (cc) and blind carbon copy (bcc) fields. You can also send Pulse messages to discuss an email case without exposing the information to external users. You are notified in the Email Manager and Case Manager portal if you receive Pulse messages. Even when an email case has been resolved and appears as read-only, you can still send Pulse messages.

For more information, see Email Manager portal and Email triage.

Improvements to the Email channel configuration and content analysis

To make the Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Email more useful and easier to manage, you can track all the Email channel configuration changes that you or other operators make. The system now also detects defined entities and topics, not only in the contents of the email messages and its attached files, but also in the email subject field which improves the responsiveness of IVA to emails. You can map same text that appears in an email triage case to different entities. In previous versions of Pega Platform, only the email body was analyzed but with subject analysis, now the entire email is analyzed for topics and entities, including its salutation and signature.

For more information, see Tracking configuration changes in the Email channel and Enabling the analysis of subject field content during email triage.

Support for Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) push notifications in Android custom mobile apps

You can now create Android custom mobile apps that use push notifications with the Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) services. The push notifications for Android custom mobile apps based on legacy Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) are deprecated, as GCM services will be officially removed from use on April 11, 2019. To continue to use push notifications, you must migrate your custom mobile apps to FCM services. Before building your custom mobile app, you must register your Android app for push notifications in the Firebase console, obtain the FCM server key and Google Services JSON file, and use the key and file in the Android certificate set to build the custom mobile app.

For more information, see Migrating Android custom mobile apps that use push notifications to Firebase Cloud Messaging, Push notifications in Android mobile app, and Android certificate set.

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.

PEGA0107 alert enables performance monitoring of offline-enabled apps

You can now monitor the performance of offline-enabled apps by analyzing PEGA0107 alerts from Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud™. PEGA0107 alerts are equivalent to PEGA0069 alerts in the context of offline-enabled applications, but PEGA0069 alerts are not generated for offline-enabled applications.

For more information, see PEGA0107 alert: Client page load time for offline-enabled applications and Pega Predictive Diagnostic Cloud Improvement Plan overview.