Published Release Notes

Enabling security policies now requires current password

As part of Pega’s initiative to protect against malicious attacks, the change password dialog has been enhanced.  When Security Policies have been enabled for your system, new users or those with expired passwords will now be prompted for both their existing password as well as their desired new password.

For more details, review the Designer Studio > System > Settings > Security Policies landing page.

Unclear error message when saving shared class instance in tenant layer

If you attempt to save a shared class instance from the tenant layer, Pega 7 displays this message:

This record has x errors. Save Failed: There was a problem saving an instance of class: Error Code: <none> SQL State: <none> Message: <none>

You cannot save a shared instance from the tenant layer if that instance cannot be overridden.

Enhanced data modeling

You can now create data types quickly in Pega Express. Use the enhanced Data Designer user interface to define the data model for your data types. More field types have been added, and they are categorized as simple, fancy, and complex to meet your data modeling needs.

For more information, see Data Designer enhancements.

Apache Ignite is no longer supported

Apache Ignite is no longer supported and has been replaced by Hazelcast Enterprise Edition 3.10 in embedded mode. If you used encryption with Apache Ignite, you can configure encryption on Hazelcast Enterprise Edition in the same way that you configured it for Apache Ignite.

For more information about encrypting nodes, see Enabling encrypted communication between nodes.

Feature management added to App Studio

You can now create and manage features in App Studio. Because this functionality is no longer restricted to Dev Studio, you can encourage all team members to adopt feature-driven development, which improves the traceability from your requirements to their respective implementations.

For more information, see Feature-driven development.

Application overview added to App Studio

High-level information about an application, such as the available channel interfaces, case types, and data types, is now available in App Studio. By monitoring your project from a holistic point of view, you can make informed decisions about how and where you want to allocate your development resources.

For more information, see Application overview.
 

Translation support added to application guides

You can now localize the content in your application guides. By referencing paragraphs instead of rich text in your chapters and tasks, you can provide guidance to users in their native language.

For more information about application guides, see Creating a guide for end users.

Optimized performance of decision strategies

Strategies that are part of data flows are now automatically optimized to achieve the best performance. You can also choose the properties that a strategy outputs to further increase the efficiency without additional strain on your hardware. 

For more information, see Adding strategies to dataflows. 

Ensure event strategy reliability through unit tests

You can now automate event strategy testing and increase the reliability of the event strategy configuration through unit tests. Avoid errors and ensure that the strategy delivers the expected results by configuring assertions on property values, aggregates, and result counts.

For more information, see Increased event strategy reliability through unit testing.

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.