Published Release Notes

Support for nested Declare Trigger rules

Pega Platform™ now supports nested Declare Trigger rules so that you can conveniently create correlations between actions in your case types. Declare Triggers rules invoke an action when a specified event takes place in a case type. You can now design more complex scenarios faster by nesting more Declare Trigger rules that work in the context of running another Declare Trigger rule. For example, when a case participant changes a postal code in their personal details, a Declare Trigger rule runs and a respective customer service representative (CSR) receives an email. After the CSR receives the email, a nested Declare Trigger rule runs and your application creates a document with the updated personal details and attaches it to the case.

For more information, see Develop applications faster with nested Declare Trigger rules (8.5), Declare Trigger rules.

Visual Business Director data is automatically cleaned after a retention period expires

To avoid negative impact on system resources, such as memory and disk space, Pega Platform™ automatically cleans out collections data accumulated in Visual Business Director after the time period specified in the vbd/dataRetentionTimeout dynamic system setting.

Upgrade impact

In versions of Pega Platform earlier than 8.5, collections data was not automatically removed. From version 8.5, the data is removed after 465 days (15 months) by default.

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

If the default data retention period does not meet your requirements, you can change it by editing the vbd/dataRetentionTimeout setting.

For more information, see "Configuring the data retention period for Visual Business Director" in the Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.5 Upgrade Guide on the Pega Customer Decision Hub product page.

Introduction of Search and Reporting Service

Pega Platform™ now uses Search and Reporting Service, which is an independent microservice. The new enhancement provides a convenient way to manage your application data, and is easier to maintain. For example, because of the cloud-based architecture of Search and Reporting Service, any bug fixes and performance improvements occur seamlessly, and have no impact on your overall experience in Pega Platform.

For more information, see Search and Reporting overview.

Ability to restrict access to the Import wizard

You can now restrict access to the Import wizard so that users implement an automated pipeline to deploy changes between environments such as staging and production. Deployment Manager is one method by which to create pipelines. By using pipelines to propagate changes, users can apply a standardized and automated deployment process for migrating their applications.

For more information, see:

• Ensuring that users migrate applications with a pipeline by restricting the Import wizard
• Understanding model-driven DevOps with Deployment Manager

Optimization check utility available for legacy strategies

Ensure that your strategies are compatible with the optimized strategy execution engine introduced in Pega Platform™ 8.1 by running a post-upgrade utility that checks strategies within your application for areas that you can optimize, for example, by reducing the number of page properties that are copied from one shape to another. Running the utility produces a report that you can use to plan the required updates to your strategies.

For more information, see Make your strategies compatible with the optimized strategy execution engine by using a check utility.

New database tables for email bots

Pega Email Bot™ now uses two new database tables that make the system more reliable and improve system performance. The pc_work_triage table stores complete information about email triage cases for the email bot. The pr_index_tracktriageactions table stores information about captured actions in triage cases.

Upgrade impact

During an upgrade to Pega Platform™ 8.5, a dedicated job scheduler automatically migrates resolved and open triage cases to these email bot tables in the background. If you expose additional properties as database columns or expose additional custom columns in the pc_work table, you must prepare your application for this automated migration. For more information, see Migrating triage cases to new tables.

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

If the pc_work table in your application has no additional properties or custom columns, there is nothing to do; if it does, prior to an upgrade to Pega Platform 8.5, you must extend the pyPopulateColumnNamesExtension data transform to any exposed additional columns in legacy tables with this information.

For more information, see Database schema for email bot tables.

Optimized data schema upgrade

Several improvements have been made to optimize the speed of the data schema upgrade to help you experience minimal downtime during upgrade to Pega Platform 8.5™. The data schema upgrade process optimizations include the following improvements:

• Optimized database index creation during upgrade
• Optimized synchronization process to detect duplicate rules during the application import process
• A new upgrade setting for Pega Cloud® Services operators that reduces the time to upgrade clients that run large Pega applications, such as the CRM Suite

For more information, see Limit upgrade downtime with data schema upgrade improvements (8.5).

Support for hotfix file verification

Pega Platform hotfix files are now digitally signed so that they can be verified and authenticated. If your Pega Platform™ instance allows outbound URL connections, hotfix files are verified automatically during installation. If your Pega Platform instance does not allow outbound URL connections, you can verify the files manually by using third-party tools. Alternatively, if your Pega Platform instance does not allow outbound URL connections and you do not use third-party tools to verify hotfix files, you can import a certificate revocation list (CRL) for Pega Platform to use when checking the files to see if they have been revoked. 

For more information, see Verifying the authenticity of hotfix files. 

Scenario tests now honor application stack settings

The application stack defined on the Application Quality Settings page of Dev Studio now serves as a foundation for creating, viewing, and running scenario tests. 

Dev Studio will now:

• Display scenario tests based on the application stack settings on the Dev Studio landing page.
• Store scenario tests with the configured stack settings.
• Report metrics in the application quality dashboard with respect to the configured stack settings.  

For more information, see Creating UI-based tests with scenario testing. 

Run an application test suite from a CI/CD pipeline

Deployment Manager, as well as the existing REST service used to call scenario tests, now accepts a test suite ID when running scenario tests from an application pipeline. By using test suites, you can customize a set of select scenario tests to run as a group, instead of running all the scenario tests that are applied to a particular application.

Only the tests that belong to the suite are run as part of the task. 

For more information, see Creating UI-based tests with scenario testing.