What's new in Pega 7.3

User interface

• When the chart for a report is displayed in a dashboard widget, you now can click any part of the chart to drill down and view the subset of data for that part.
• Repeating grid layouts support heading levels, editing, sorting, and filtering. Additional actions are supported when optimized for mobile.
• You can include icons or cells in layout group headers.
• You can now add combo box functionality to an autocomplete control.
• To improve scalability, Pega Platform now supports flexbox-based layouts by default in all its screen and column layouts and layout groups.
• You can deliver a single page application experience in your portals by using single-document dynamic containers.

• Section references inside a dynamic layout have the same configuration options as top-level section includes.

• You can add your custom controls to the Basic or Advanced menus in a section.
• Navigate Designer Studio using the keyboard to select and search menu options.

• You can create email correspondence using email templates.

• Replace custom logic in your application with a Wait shape in a flow that supports variations of a resolved status, such as Resolved-Completed and Resolved-Rejected.

• Continue a discussion that was initiated by email when you post a message to Pulse or reply to an email message. Some limitations apply.

• Upgrade your surveys to use the latest capabilities, which are now provided in a standard ruleset instead of a separate archive.

• Add the Send Notification step to the life cycle of a case, or call the corresponding API, to notify users when an event occurs, such as the creation of a purchase order.

• Create notification rules to send messages to a list of recipients who are working in end user portals.

• Set your notification preferences to receive updates for the cases that you choose.

• Users can set Pulse email notification preferences in the Case Manager and Case Worker portals.

• You can now create branch reviews and collaborate with other users on the reviews.

• You can now view branch contents and information such as guardrails, and add branches from and push branches to a repository.

• You can now create PegaUnit test cases for flows and case types.

• You can now use additional assertions for PegaUnit tests for flows and case types, including case status, assigned to, attachment exists, and case instance count.

• You can now create PegaUnit test suites to test multiple test cases.

• You can now define and manage features and child features that you want to implement in your application.
• When you are developing an application and designing case types, you can link each case type to top-level features in Designer Studio.
• You can now create application guides that direct users through a set of tasks.
• Capture feedback about your application in real time by using Agile Workbench.
• Integrate Agile Workbench with Pega Agile Studio.

• As a business scientist, use the Decision Analytics work area to develop and manage Predictive, Adaptive, and Text Analytics models in your application.
• Browse events as part of customer movie timeline view.
• Create a File data set.
• Create a Kafka data set.
• Create globally optimized Strategy rules.
• Detect customer intents as part of Text Analytics feature.
• Create resilient real-time and batch mode Data Flow runs.
• Select multiple Pega Platform nodes as part of the Adaptive Decision Manager service.
• Specify the granularity of data aggregation in VBD data sets.
• Trace Cassandra queries in Decision Data Store nodes.
• Use improved diagnostics and logging facilities for Decision Data Store nodes.
• The Visual Business Director service is renamed to Real Time Data Grid service.

• You configure a mobile app or an SDK mobile app as an channel interface.

• You can customize the presentation of a paused custom mobile app for Android.

• You can use a Today widget in your custom mobile apps for iOS.

• Attaching content in offline mode has been enhanced. A list of content is now displayed in the application while in offline mode.
• Validate rules and function rules are supported in offline mode.
• You can signal to the user general, warning events, not only error events of an offline-enabled application.
• You can set the time period during which a user of an offline-enabled application stays logged in before the lock screen is displayed.
• You can enable OAuth 2.0 token support to increase the security of data synchronization.
• A new option allows to conditionally log out from the offline-enabled application in a browser.
• Button labels, links and radio buttons are supported for localization of offline-enabled applications.

 

Core engine

• Property-level security has been added to full-text search so that you can limit access to sensitive data. From the Search landing page, you can specify whether to include properties with access control policies in search results.
• Pega Platform now uses the Apache Log4j 2 logging service. Apache Log4j 2 improves performance and provides support for all log file appender types. As a result of this upgrade, the prlogging.xml file has been renamed to prlog4j2.xml and the format of the file has changed considerably. For more information, see the PDN article Pega Platform logging using Log4j 2.
• You can manage your system queues from the new System Queue Management landing page. From this landing page you can debug applications without exiting Designer Studio. In addition to viewing items in a queue, you can defer, remove, and requeue items in a queue; stop items in progress; and view an item's XML.
• Pega Platform includes the Apache Ignite platform, which supports encryption for intracluster communications. You can now configure encryption for intracluster traffic for compliance with regulatory or organizational security requirements.
• You can now encrypt communication among search nodes. Encryption secures the data that is transferred across nodes so that it cannot be accessed by unauthorized hosts.
• Data security is improved for BIX extracts in the Pega Cloud. BIX extracts are now processed through the use of a HIPAA-compliant system.
• Property-level security has been added to full-text search so that you can limit access to sensitive data. From the Search landing page, you can specify whether to include properties with access control policies in search results. In addition, for custom search, you can select which properties to include in full-text search by selecting options on the Search landing page and Custom Search properties instance.
• Batch database processing has been enhanced to ensure that a constraint violation does not occur when you save transactions to a table with a foreign key dependency.

Core engine

• Pega Platform can now read data from and write data to a Couchbase Server database.
• From the Requestor Management landing page, you can now manage active requestors, trace them, and debug their activity on all nodes in the cluster, including on the current node and remote nodes.
• On the new Listener Management landing page, you can view and manage available listeners across the cluster, including on the current node and remote nodes. By using this landing page, you can quickly debug and trace listeners.
• You can now configure one node with multiple node types by using the node classification feature, which segregates nodes by their purpose.
• You can view the list of agents and listeners across the cluster with their associated node types by using the Node Classification landing page.
• Node types have been renamed: UniversalNode is now Universal; WebUserNode is now WebUser; BackgroundProcessingNode is now BackgroundProcessing; BIXNode is now BIX; SearchNodeis now Search.
• The Pega-RULES:SystemCleaner agent has been split into the Pega-RulesEngine:NodeCleaner and Pega-RulesEngine:ClusterAndDBCleaner agents.
• You can now deploy Pega Platform in the new client-server clustering topology that uses Apache Ignite, which provides greater cluster stability in large clusters and supports the ability for servers and clients to be separately scaled up.

• You can now set default values for data that you import for a data type from a .csv file.
• The Data Import wizard for data types now supports all Microsoft Excel default date formats. Dates are easier to handle, and you are alerted before data is imported if the date format is not supported.
• The Record Editor and Import wizard for data types have been enhanced to make the import process faster and easier to use.
• By using a Java API, you can serialize a Page or Property clipboard object to a JSON string for faster JSON serialization. For more information, see the PDN article Using the mapping API for high-performance JSON serialization.

• You can now use Microsoft SharePoint Online to store and source case and Pulse attachments and to store and source attachments during automated case processing.
• You can now implement and post your own pluggable web storage components for use with case and Pulse attachments. These web components can be plugged in to Pega Platform without the need to make changes to Pega Platform itself.
• Request data can now be persisted when synchronous REST Service processing fails.
• You can now configure a fallback response activity for a time-out for Service REST and SOAP. Using a fallback response activity makes it easier to meet a service-level agreement (SLA) by providing a logical response in a timely manner.

• Pega Platform now runs on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. For more information, see the PDN article Deploying Pega Platform on Pivotal Cloud Foundry by using Ops Manager.

• To automatically take specific actions based on archive metadata before or after importing an archive, add pre-import and post-import action steps to collections. For more information, see Pre-import and post-import collections.

Security

• You can disable operators that are inactive for a certain number of days.
• You can now use global resource settings in SAML configurations.
• You can generate and process JSON Web Tokens to support authentication.
• Access control policies now support masking individual scalar property values from specific users.
• You can monitor standard and custom security events for every user session.
• REST services now support OAuth 2.0 authorization through a SAML assertion.
• You can source certificates and encryption keys from external keystores.
• Security Policies now support two-factor authentication with a one-time password.
• Access roles support privilege inheritance to define access rights more easily.
• APIs and REST services now support cross-origin resource sharing policies.

Conversational channels

• Use conversational channels like Facebook Messenger, Amazon Alexa, an email, or text messaging (SMS) to interact with a Pega Platform application, for example, to open a case.
• To use Facebook Messenger as Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant to interact with Pega Platform, configure the Facebook channel.
• To use email messages as Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant to interact with Pega Platform, configure the Email channel.
• View channel interactions to track information and problems reported by users of a Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant channel.

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