Published Release Notes

Improved view authoring

Case authoring in Cosmos React UI now features updated view authoring tools. The redesigned view tab and overlay provide a more intuitive interface for creating views, applying design templates, and adding fields and controls. This enhanced work environment improves the user experience and reduces context switching, which contributes to a lower development effort.

For more information, see Editing views in a case type.

Personalized views in table layouts

Table layouts now provide users with the option to save preferred run-time configurations, such as column visibility and filtering, as permanent profiles. This enhancement helps users create dedicated views for specific work scenarios, which reduces the need for repetitive adjustments to the user interface and improves productivity.

For more information, see Enabling table personalization.

Upgrade impact

After an upgrade to 8.4 and later, the default table toolbar styling and experience may be unexpectedly different for any customized tables in a client's application: if you enabled a tool bar action for a personalizable table and the 8.4 application overrides your customization, your application now displays the default 8.4 table toolbar.

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

Existing clients that upgrade to Pega Platform 8.4 and later may need to update applications in some scenarios. Any custom actions present in the overridden section may need to be re-authored into this toolbar using the additional actions section.

Default views for cases and data objects

Pega Platform™ now generates default views for new case types and data objects. Because of this feature, your application now automatically creates a case summary and case details view for every new case type, and a list view for each data object. The default views automate a common recurring task, and improve productivity by reducing development effort.

Enhancements for fields in views and data models

Pega Platform™ now provides a unified experience of adding fields to views, the case type data model, and the application data model, by using an intuitive dialog box. For greater clarity, a new field type, data relationship, replaces data references, field groups, and field group lists. As a result, you can conveniently reuse data objects in your application. 

When you upgrade to Pega 8.5, your system automatically converts your field groups, field group lists, and data references to data relationships. The case type data model now displays all the fields by default, including any referenced fields, and provides an application layer that contains each field. Use this functionality to view how the data is organized across your system.

For more information, see Define fields in data objects intuitively (8.5), Adding data relationships to fields and data models.

Improved contracts for implementations

For more complete contracts, automations now support embedded pages, default values, and picklists. These enhancements provide a more robust model for inputs and outputs that is easier to update and maintain.

For more information, see Viewing automations.

Web portal reuse removed from the mobile channel

The reuse of web portals for creating mobile apps with a single web view is no longer supported. You can conveniently update your existing channels that reuse web portals to take advantage of the multiple-views experience and native mobile capabilities, such as native mobile list views or floating action buttons.

Upgrade impact

The Reuse web portal option is removed from Pega Platform 8.5 and later.

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

App developers need to use the migration tool available on the mobile channel to move their apps to the recommended new navigation designer. When users open existing mobile channel with the Reuse web portal option configured, they are prompted to run through the wizard to upgrade the mobile channel to the latest Pega Mobile Client based configuration. When this is done, app developers should rebuild the app.

Enhancements to automations for defining Pega API contracts

With enhanced automations, you can now pass embedded pages, specify default values for optional input parameters, and define a set of values for inputs by using the picklist or enumerated field types. The new enhancements make your applications easier to define and maintain, and you can now provide callers of Pega APIs with a clear description of the API.

For more information, see Viewing automations.

New branch quality dashboard

Pega Platform™ 8.4 introduces a new branch quality dashboard that shows the following metrics:

• The branch’s guardrail compliance score and the number of guardrail violations
• The percentage and number of unit tests that passed for the branch
• The percentage and number of rules that the tests cover
• Potential merge conflicts that can be addressed directly from the branch quality dashboard

For more information about the new branch quality dashboard, see Viewing branch quality and branch contents.

Reports with visualizations of performance and automation levels for the email bot

In the Email Manager portal, you can now use built-in reports to visualize Pega Email Bot™ performance and the automation levels that are related to received emails, triaged cases, and created business cases. You can plug the reports to display the report data in other portals, for example the Case Manager portal. Based on the information displayed in the reports, you can adjust the machine learning models to achieve greater automation in the system.

For more information, see Viewing the reports for the Email channel and Built-in reports for the email bot.

Increased visibility of strategy design changes with simulation batch tests

Improve your understanding of the impact that individual changes to strategy design have on the decision funnel by running batch simulation tests directly from the strategy canvas. With batch simulation tests, you can check that your strategy changes produce the expected results, and immediately see the results in context.

For more information, see Increase the real-time visibility of strategy design changes with simulation batch tests (8.4).

Upgrade impact

After an upgrade to 8.4 and later, simulation outputs produced from earlier versions cannot be used to view canvas counts.

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

Following a software upgrade to 8.4 or later, clients must re-run existing simulations in Decision Funnel mode to view the counts in the canvas.