Offline capability

For Pega Platform applications that are built with offline capability, you can create a case and complete any of the assignments listed in your worklist while working offline. The Pega offline feature for applications is designed so that it is always functioning in offline mode. All behavior and capabilities do not change no matter if you are online or offline. The online mode is a special case of offline. When the offline-enabled application is online, data synchronization communicates all the necessary changes between the client and the server almost immediately.

When your device is offline, and you attempt to open or submit an assignment or to create a new case, all steps are saved in the queue. A case that is created while offline is not displayed in the user interface until data synchronization has occurred. An indicator on the application screen keeps track of the number of items added to the queue. When the network connection state changes and the device comes back online, data synchronization is triggered automatically for the offline-enabled application, and any saved data is updated to the server. An indicator displays whether you are online, offline or currently synchronizing with the server. The indicator in the offline-enabled application does not display SYNCING or SYNCED if synchronization takes less than 4 seconds or when the server is unavailable. The indicator also does not display the FAILED status when the network has been disconnected or the server becomes unavailable; it only displays this status when another type of data synchronization issue has occurred.

Note: The UI Kit available in Pega Platform applications by default uses the following indicators: offline and failed. If you want to use also the online, synched/syncing, and items to sync indicators, you must use an older UI Kit version or create a user interface control in your application with the CSS classes for these additional indicators.

Whether your device is online or offline, any changes that you make after completing an assignment or creating a new case are submitted immediately to the action queue.

The following table indicates under which conditions the data synchronization is started for an offline-enabled application.

Understanding offline behavior

To successfully use offline capability, an application end user must successfully log in to the server and let the synchronization successfully finish, at least once. Only after the initial synchronization takes place, can offline capability be used with the application. Back-to-back assignments are supported. However, offline work flow processing will not work on decision shapes, utility shapes, and subprocess shapes.

Each time a user logs in to the server after the user credentials have been changed, the offline user credentials are synchronized. In this case, if any actions in the queue are waiting for synchronization, the user is prompted to enter the old password on the device, only once. As an alternative, the user might decide not to provide the password and discard the pending actions.

Note: When a user clicks a case, pulse, calendar or a link that requires the offline-enabled application to be connected to the server (online), an alert is displayed on the screen to indicate that the feature is not available in offline mode.

Configuration note

You build an offline-enabled mobile app by creating a new mobile channel interface. When building an application for offline use, enable offline capability and choose optimistic locking in the case type settings. You must also enable offline for access groups and configure at least one case for offline use. Additionally, when configuring an application to use offline capability, remember that a portal based on the Case Worker portal (such as pyCaseWorker) must be set as the default for every access group whose users will be accessing the application.

Note: For guidelines about configuring an offline-enabled mobile app, see the Offline mobility guidelines PDN article.

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