Published Release Notes

Aggregate data in interaction history summaries

You can now group, aggregate, and filter interaction history data in a single strategy component. By using interaction history summaries, you can create refined data sets that simplify strategy frameworks and accelerate decision-making. Aggregated data sets are easier to process, manage, and troubleshoot.

For more information, see Data Sources landing page

Support for additional health metrics on the Application Quality landing page

On the Application Quality landing page, you can monitor the health of your current application to identify areas that need improvement before deployment. The landing page provides application metrics such as the number of executable rules, the guardrail score, the number of guardrail warnings, the test coverage percentage, and the pass rate of PegaUnit tests. From this landing page, you can also view data for the entire application, for each of its cases, and for rules that are not part of any case type.

For more information, see Application Quality landing page.

Ability to annotate case attachments

Pega^® Platform application users can now add annotations to images that are attached to cases. For example, users can draw around an area of an image to highlight a faulty element of the device. Users can annotate all images, except for signature images or attachments that are stored in Pega Cloud or other external data stores. The annotated case attachments replace the original ones.

For more information, see Case attachment annotations.

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.

REST APIs for VTable cache management and quiesce operations

You can access, control, and manage in-memory VTable in cache for a specific rule class and instance name by using new Nodes REST APIs. You can reassemble and reload rules across the cluster and obtain cache entries for a specific node in the cluster. You can also start and cancel the quiesce process on any node in the cluster by using either immediate drain or slow drain.

For more information, see Pega API for Pega Platform 7.4 and Pega API.

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.

Quicker approach for reusing processes in a stage

You can now reuse processes more quickly in a stage when you define the life cycle for a case type. Reusing processes saves time and makes it easier to define processes for a stage instead of creating new ones. You can also reuse processes faster when you add parallel processes to a stage.

For more information, see Quick access for reusing processes in a stage.

Support for enterprise and express applications

When you run the New Application wizard, you can create two types of applications:

• Enterprise – A full-scale application that has access to all the capabilities in the Pega 7 Platform.
  
  By default, enterprise applications are developed in Designer Studio, but users have access to express mode.
• Express – A small-scale application that has access to a subset of the capabilities in the Pega 7 Platform.
  
  Express applications are developed in express mode, and are ideal for new users or for quickly testing functionality.

For more information, see Express applications.

Support for application-specific REST API calls

You can now call an authenticated REST API in the context of any application that is listed on an operator record by using the application alias URL. With the application alias URL, you can also develop REST services without changing the access group in the service package. REST services run in the context of the access group that points to the provided application, instead of the access group that is specified in the service package.

For more information, see Invoking a REST service rule.

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.