Available in March 2009, Process Commander V5.5 offers hundreds of new capabilities for developers, application users, and system administrators, and resolves issues found in earlier versions.

This article describes the many new capabilities for application user interfaces. Follow the links below to access knowledgebase articles with examples and more detail. To learn about V5.5 features in other areas, see What's New in Version 5.5.

This article highlights new features in six areas:

• Composite portals
• Smart Layouts
• Styles and branding
• History and attachments display
• DataGrid control
• Accessibility

Composite portals

Version 5.5 introduces composite portals — portals for application users and workers based on familiar harness and section rules rather than specialized "gadgets".

Composite portals allow developers greater flexibility in presentation and function than the portals included in earlier V5 releases. The older portals — now called "traditional" to distinguish them from composite portals — remain available and supported.

Two standard composite portals mimic the functions of the traditional portals, but are easier to evolve and customize. See:

• About composite portals
• How to create a composite portal
• How to add a menu bar to a composite portal
• How to include a Work Area in a composite portal
• How to create a skin for a composite portal with the Application Skin wizard

Smart Layouts

Smart Layouts, a new type of table element for harness, section, and flow actions, help ensure that work object forms in your application are attractive and easy for users to understand and navigation. Horizontal alignment of columns containing labels and fields is far easier for developers to achieve.

• How to create attractive work object forms using Smart Layouts
• Tips and tactics for converting to Smart Layouts

Styles and branding

V5.5 offers new and improved tools for understanding and evolving CSS styles.

Through a Developer portal preference, you can see the effect of a portal skin as you develop harness, section, and flow action forms. See How to preview the effect of style changes on work object forms

The Style Discovery tool, part of the Rules Inspector allows you to identify the style elements that apply to any part of a work object form.

See How to identify and evolve styles for work object forms with the Style Discovery tool

History and attachment display

The history and attachment displays are produced by list view rules, which you can adapt to control the content of columns and which columns appear. The results can replace the standard display, or be presented and accessed by different means. For an example, see How to customize work object history and attachment displays. (In versions before V5.5, these displays were not auto-generated and so more difficult to customize.)

DataGrid control

As an alternative to the Row Repeat control, your flow actions and work object forms can present a Value List or Page List property in a DataGrid, as in this example. DataGrids can support highly-interactive data entry and editing. See How to present a Page List property as a grid

Accessibility

First introduced with V5.3SP1, the PegaWAI RuleSet in V5.5 supports an expanded set of options and capabilities for making your applications accessible. See About the Accessibility Framework.

Other enhancements

How and when to save images as data rather than in rules