Published Release Notes

View attachments inline

You can now view thumbnails of PDF file and image attachments and icons of video attachments in Pulse, cases, and other areas of the application that allow you to attach files. Thumbnails provide a preview of your attachments inline. You can also play video attachments and expand the thumbnails of PDF file and image attachments to view them in readable formats.

For more information, see Inline preview of attachments.

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.

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.

Support for large case attachments

You can now attach large files to a case on a variety of cloud storage options, including Pega Cloud File Storage, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and JFrog Artifactory. Files can be 1 to 2 GB depending on your environment configuration. Attachments are streamed to the selected storage option without being loaded into memory, which reduces the risk of generating an out-of-memory error. Additionally, all cloud instances now have the new Pega Cloud File Storage repository defined.

For more information, see Storing case attachments outside the Pega Platform database.

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.

REST APIs for viewing Pega Platform configuration settings

New REST APIs in the Nodes category provide a view of the current configuration settings for any node in a cluster or for an entire cluster. You can also find a specific node ID by listing all the nodes in the cluster. To diagnose settings issues for a node, you can download the prconfig.xml file.

For more information, see Pega API for Pega Platform 7.4, Pega API, and Viewing the current configuration settings for a node or the whole cluster.

View the configuration settings for Pega Platform nodes in Designer Studio

On the new Configuration Settings landing page, you can view a list of the configuration settings for a specific node, current or remote, or for an entire cluster. From this landing page you can diagnose settings issues, determine whether settings are loaded correctly, and review the settings' purposes. You can also download the prconfig.xml file for any node in a cluster to modify the settings. The ability to view settings for all nodes in the Cluster from a single landing page makes diagnosing configuration issues across the cluster simpler and easier than logging on to each node individually to view its system settings. For example, if a started agent does not run, you can check if agents are enabled on your system; or if some of your caches are too big, you can check the setting for the cache size. You can also determine if settings are loaded correctly, and identify discrepancies in the settings across the nodes.

For more information, see Viewing the current configuration settings of a node or the whole cluster, Downloading and viewing the prconfig.xml file for a specific node, REST APIs for viewing the configuration settings for Pega Platform.

Support for multiple attachments added to Pulse

You can now upload more than one attachment to posts and comments in Pulse. Because Pulse maintains the continuity of attachments in posts, email messages, and email notifications, you can use it to quickly follow conversations in a case.

For more information about the features that Pulse supports, see Communicating with Pulse.

Support for extracting data from file attachments during email triage

With the Pega^® Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Email, when you triage email interaction cases, the system can now use defined text analyzers to detect entities in files that are attached to the received email. The following file types are supported: DOC, DOCX, ODT, PDF, RTF, and TXT. This feature improves the machine learning and case processing capability for the Email user channel.

For more information, see Enabling the analysis of attached files during email triage.