Understanding the Pega-ProCom agents

The agents in the Pega-ProCom RuleSet process email, process service level rules and assignments, and so on. The agents in this rule provide the following types of processing: SR-1367 B-16935 Concurrent

Use care to ensure that the Pega-ProCom agents rule has access to all the RuleSet Versions it needs. Symptoms of incorrect configuration can include:

1. Checking incoming email (deprecated)

Old This agent is deprecated for V5.3 and later but remains available for backwards compatibility.

In versions before V5.3, the Incoming Mail tab of email account instances was used to configure email accounts that managed incoming email and this activity, @baseclass.Email_CheckIncoming, processed incoming email messages.

Tip As a best practice, configure and use email services (rather than the email account approach) to manage incoming email. If you implement the email services approach, do not enable this agent.

2. Processing service level events

The activity System-Queue-ServiceLevel.ProcessEvent supports service level processing for both assignments and work items. Enable this row of the Agent Schedule form unless your applications use only non-BPM rules-engine facilities. 5.5

This agent uses the queuing facility introduced in V5.4 for higher throughput. Flow processing creates queue entries (instances of the System-Queue-ServiceLevel class) and the activity dequeues them and processes them. 5.5 RULE-1512 MIRAT

By default, this activity starts every 30 seconds; you can choose a higher or lower interval.

You can update three standard settings rules to control how many assignments the agent processes in a batch and other parameters. See PDN article Understanding service levels and System Settings for the Pega-ProCom agent.

3. Applying a flow action to assignments in bulk

The activity Assign-.AgentBulkProcessing performs background processing of flow actions in bulk against assignments, when requested through the bulk processing feature of the Process Work workspace of the Case Manager portal. See Case Manager portal — How to process assignments and cases in bulk.

Enable this row of the Agent Schedule form to allow managers to process assignments in the background.

Because this activity is designed to detect and work around locked work items, enable this row on only one node (of a multinode cluster) unless this causes your system to have unwanted long delays in background bulk processing. Increasing the number of simultaneously executing copies of this activity may not increase throughput in proportion, because of contention for locks.

4. Sending out email correspondence

The activity Data-Corr-.Send supports outgoing email if your system contains one or more Email Account data instances with a second key part of Notify. B-25134 SR-702

This agent uses the queuing facility introduced in V5.4, allowing the agent to run on multiple nodes without risk of locking or deadlock issues, for higher throughput. GRP-403 PROJ-1380 RULE-1509

5. Retrieving PDF files

The activity @baseclass.GetConvertedPDFsfromPDM requests that the PegaDISTRIBUTION Manager send a converted Portable Document Format (PDF) file to the PRPC server. The agent then attaches the document as a file attachment to the original work item, using an attachment category identified in the earlier parameter to the standard activity Work-.ConvertAttachmentToPDF.C-2438

Enable the row containing this activity if your application uses the PegaDISTRIBUTION Manager (PDM) and COS to convert Word DOC attachments to PDF format.