To speed up case creation and accommodate the most frequent business needs, Case Designer now adds a default Create stage to your case life cycle every time you create a new case type, both in App Studio and Dev Studio. The Create stage includes a view with fields that users fill in to capture required data before case processing starts. The Create stage brings more clarity to designing case life cycles, because now you know exactly which fields users interact with before submitting a case, and you can see the fields in the context of your case type. Previously you configured the view that users completed before processing a case outside the case life cycle.

For greater flexibility, when you define the content of the Create stage, you can use both single screens and multistep forms to capture the initial data. For example, in an application to process loan requests, you can design the Create stage to display a form that users fill in to provide personal details and a loan request amount. To reach wider audiences, you can create a channel-specific process inside the Create stage, for example a process for users that interact with your application through a chat bot.

The following figure shows the creation a new case type that includes the Create stage by default:

A default Create stage facilitates the application development process by making a case life cycle independent of the pyStartCase starting process. As a result, your application is more granular and easier to maintain.

The Create stage also enhances workload management, because users can now discard any case that is in the Create stage, before the case processing starts. A discarded case has a Resolved-Cancelled status, and, worklists and work queues consequently omit such discarded cases.

After you upgrade to Pega Platform™ 8.5, you can choose to include the Create stage in your existing case types. If you decide not to include the Create stage, all of your case types still continue to operate correctly. 

For more information, see The Create stage.