Published Release Notes

Full-screen menus improve mobile navigation

A new full-screen menu setting for enhanced mobile functionality provides a smooth and seamless mobile navigation experience. Previously, regular drop-down menus were difficult to navigate on a mobile device. Select Component styles > Menus > Menu Bar > Display "Show Menu" as full screen menu to enable and configure this setting in a Skin form.

Personalize your dashboard with widgets and templates

New personalized dashboards can be customized and shared by end users. Select a default template or create your own. Choose from one of several default widgets or design a configurable widget to provide core business metrics to your users. From the new Settings tab, you can select whether a section is a template or widget.

Data page automated unit testing

Automated unit testing for data pages now provides a guided way to create and modify automated unit test cases for data pages. Test cases are created by running the data page and converting to a test. Unit tests compare the expected value of a property with the property’s actual value on the data page.

Landing page for data page automated unit test

A new landing page lists all test cases that are associated with the data pages in an application. The landing page includes the data page that corresponds to the test, the data type, and the results of the most recent test case run. A new test case can be created and added from the landing page. Existing test cases can also be run either individually or in batches from the landing page.

Updated Rule-Utility-Function resolution

Rule-Utility-Function rules are now resolved based on ruleset.

Previously, if you had the same function @xyz() in different libraries in different rulesets, you could not call the function by using @xyz, because that would throw an exception.

The resolution process has since been updated so that rule resolution is now based on the highest ruleset in context. This update makes the function resolution process consistent with how rule resolution is performed for other rule types.

For more information, see Functions in expressions.

Work with delegated records in the new Configuration dashboard

Business users can manage and modify delegated items from the new Configuration dashboard on the Case Manager portal. The dashboard allows business users to:

• Create and edit instances (records) of any application data type (including Products and Customers)
• Edit the content of any paragraph rule
• Revise application logic that is defined in basic decision tables

Define function input parameters on the Create or Save As forms

When creating or updating a Rule-Utility-Function ruleset in Designer Studio, use the Create or Save As forms to define or change parameters as a part of the form. The Parameters section on either of these forms allows you to set the function's name and Java type before opening the function.

Previously, you updated these fields on the Parameters tab for the function after the form was created. Moving these fields to the Create and Save As forms helps to proactively detect functions with the same signature in the same ruleset before saving the function.

For more information, see Defining function input parameters on the Create or Save As forms.

Support for Oracle TIMESTAMP data types

The Oracle TIMESTAMP data type is now fully supported throughout the Pega 7 data layer. The TIMESTAMP columns for data provide greater precision than the previously available DATE columns.

This release does not include any columns that use the TIMESTAMP data type at installation. However, after installation or upgrade:

• Any newly created columns (for example, those created when optimizing a property or defining a new table) use the TIMESTAMP column type.
• Any existing data still uses DATE values.
  • Oracle users can manually convert any existing DATE column types to use a TIMESTAMP column type instead.
  • Altering the column type for existing values in a column does not provide any greater precision for those values because they still use DATE values and not DATETIME values.

For more information, see DateTime property mapping in Oracle for Pega 7.

Updates to the Business Intelligence Exchange (BIX) product

The Business Intelligence Exchange (BIX) add-on has been updated with several new features. BIX 7.1.8 fully supports extraction of data from a Pega 7 multi-tenant instance. BIX can also now be run on Pega Cloud instances. Additionally, the new pxExtractDataWithArgs activity can be used by on-premises customers to schedule BIX runs by using Pega Platform agents.

For more information, see the BIX 7.1 User Guide.

Ability to periodically defragment the PR_SYS_LOCKS table

Lock management in Pega 7 is controlled through the database table PR_SYS_LOCKS. Because of the high volume of entries inserted into and deleted from this table during case processing, the data in the PR_SYS_LOCKS table can become highly fragmented, causing degraded performance over time.

You can now periodically defragment this table. The following Dynamic System Settings control when and how often defragmentation takes place using DefragSysLocksDaemon:

• syslocks/defragIntervalType

  • ​Custom interval type to run defragmentation

  • Set this first – determines whether defragmentation occurs daily at a specified hour or at a recurring interval

• ​syslocks/defragHourOfDay
  • ​​Used to run defragmentation at a specified hour
  • Accepts only integer values in the range 0-23
  • Example: run defragmentation daily at 1 AM by entering a value of "1"

  • Can be ignored if syslocks/defragIntervalType indicates a a specified periodic interval

• syslocks/defragIntervalInHours
  • Used to run defragmentation at specified periodic intervals
  • Accepts only integer values > 0

  • Example: run defragmentation every four hours by entering a value of "4"

  • Can be ignored if syslocks/defragIntervalType indicates a specified hour

For more information, see PEGA0056 alert monitors PR_SYS_LOCKS defragmentation performance.