Published Release Notes

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.

More flexibility for Date Time predictors in adaptive models

You can configure adaptive model predictors that indicate the amount of time that has elapsed since a particular event. In versions of Pega Platform™ earlier than 8.5, you could only specify the absolute date and time, for example, the date when a subscriber last visited one of your brick-and-mortar store locations. In Pega Platform 8.5, you can also indicate the amount of time that has passed, for example, the number of days since a subscriber purchased a new service plan.

For more information, see Adding a predictor to an adaptive model.

Data pages can source information from a robotic process automation

When you use robotic process automation (RPA), you can now configure data pages to source information from robotic automations so that you can connect your Pega® Platform application to legacy applications in your enterprise. By using automations to retrieve data and save it to a data page, you can use data virtualization to encapsulate your Pega Platform data model from the physical interface of a legacy system against which the automation is running.

For more information, see Obtaining information from robotic automations.

Data pages can source information from a robotic desktop automation

You can now configure data pages to source information from robotic desktop automations (RDA). Using an RDA to source a data page allows you to connect your Pega Platform™ application to any application that is accessible from an end-user's desktop. By using automations to retrieve data and load it into a data page, you can use data virtualization to separate your Pega Platform data model from the physical interface of a legacy system against which the automation is running.

For more information, see Obtaining information from robotic automations.

Add Robotic Automation capabilities to your application by using the Connect Robot rule

Pega Platform™ supports a new Connect Robot rule that you can use to integrate robotic automation capabilities into your application. You can publish information about automation bundles from Robotic Automation Studio directly to Dev Studio and automatically generate and display new rules. Also, when you source data pages from robotic desktop automations (RDA), Pega Platform displays a list of automations from which you can choose.

For more information, see About Connect Robot rules.

Push notification delivery to multiple devices

Push notifications sent from the Pega 7 Platform are now delivered to all devices on which a user is logged in to your custom mobile app, regardless of the device platform. You can either send push notifications from the Push Console to all users who have your application installed on their devices, or configure your application to send push notifications to indicate that an action might be required, a status update is available, or a case was approved.

Questionnaires available in App Studio

App Studio now supports authoring questionnaires, which in previous releases of Pega Platform™ were known as surveys. You can create questionnaires, add question pages, and populate the pages with questions of different types so that you can collect the exact data that your business processes require. For more efficient data management and reuse, data objects from a data model now store answers to questions, instead of autogenerated properties. For example, when a customer provides a date of birth in a questionnaire, and your application stores the date as a data object, you can conveniently reuse that data object in related cases. For greater flexibility, both standard Pega Platform and Cosmos React applications support questionnaires, however, some question types are unavailable in Cosmos React.

For more information, see:

• Create questionnaires in a low-code way in App Studio (8.6)
• Creating a questionnaire

Connect MQ rules configured with alias queue do not work after upgrade

Connect MQ rules that you defined with an alias queue in earlier versions of Pega Platform do not work after an upgrade to Pega Platform 8.6.

Upgrade impact

If you defined an alias queue in Connect MQ rules, after an upgrade to Pega Platform 8.6, those Connect MQ rules do not work.

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

In the Pega-IntegrationEngine ruleset, create the following dynamic system settings and their default values:

• "mq/pmo" = 0
• "mq/gmo" = 0
• "mq/oo_request" = 1040
• "mq/oo_response" = 16

For more information, see Creating a dynamic system setting.

Authenticate users in processes with a JSON Web Token

You can generate and process a JSON Web Token (JWT) in Pega^® Platform to secure communications in Pega Platform applications. JWTs are intended to securely transmit small amounts of information between two parties. Because the JWT is signed, the integrity of the information is assured. The contents of the JWT can be used to authenticate a user or to exchange information.

For more information, see Token Profile data instance.

Upgrade/update fails if PostGIS is applied to PegaRULES or PegaDATA schema

If you use the PostGIS extension to a PostgreSQL database, upgrading or updating the Pega 7 Platform fails if the extension has been applied to either the PegaRULES or PegaDATA schema. PostGIS can be applied to any other schema.