Discussion
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Last activity: 2 May 2023 14:41 EDT
Ask the Expert - Traditional UI vs Constellation UI with Raghavan S.K.
Join @RaghavanSK in this Ask the Expert session on Traditional UI vs Constellation UI!
Session dates: 10 April - 21 April
Make sure to Follow and Favorite for updates!
This session will open for questions on 10th April!
Meet Your Expert:
My name is Raghavan. I joined Pega in 2012 and have been instrumental in building several UI components. Later, as part of the frontend team, I contributed to enhancing Dev Studio and several core components. I was also involved in building the Constellation architecture. Currently, I lead one of the frontend teams that primarily builds customer service-related components.
Message From Your Expert:
Hello everyone, there has been a lot of excitement, questions, and concerns around Pega's new architecture called Constellation. In this session, let's put most, if not all, of them to rest. I'm excited and eager to answer all of your questions and learn from you during these sessions. As someone once said, 'Assume nothing, question everything'.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Our April Ask the Expert session is now open for your questions!
Ask the Expert Rules
- Follow the Pega Support Center's Rules of Engagement
- This is not a Live Chat - @RaghavanSK will reply to your questions over the course of the session
- Questions should be clearly and succinctly expressed
- Questions should be of interest to many others in the audience
- Have fun!
Virtusa UK Ltd
GB
@RaghavanSK With traditional architecture, we had the freedom to achieve any requirement. Is it possible to achieve the same with constellation? Main problem I see is that documentation and samples available are bit high level. A low level indepth academy course will help. Are there plans to launch any?
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@GaneshKumarC3200 Those are some great questions :)
To answer the first part of your question about having the freedom to achieve anything, Our approach with cosntellation has been to use “center-out” architecture which starts with business outcomes as first step and not building UI, Constellation is about having prescribed design approach , we do not want citizen developers to worry nitty gritties about customising UI rather focus on business rules.
I want to also mention that traditional UI will continued to be supported , also constellation is not a one-on-one replacement for traditional UI. Ultimately, you can choose between Traditional UI (section-based) and Constellation UI (view-based) for your applications based on your specific requirements. Here is flow chart that can come handy.
Regarding the course we do have plans but I have again reached out to Pega academy team to publish this info soon.
Thanks for your feedback :)
Natwest
GB
@RaghavanSK Thanks for the response. The challenge with the flowchart is that we cannot make a decision on what requirements we have today. If I start a new application with certain set of requirements, flow chart telling me to use constellation. But what if I get a new business requirement falling within the limitation, I dont have an alternate way. For example, I am using 8.7 today and all my current requirements can be done in constellation. But in few months later, business comes up with requirement to use GetNextWork, I will be blocked since 8.7 does not support. Upgrading quickly to next version is not possible as we have multiple apps running in the environment. So unless and until PEGA can give a full guarantee that whatever we can achiev using traditional can be achieved in some form in constellation, I feel its risky to adopt. Please let me know your view.
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@GaneshKumarC16656090 every release we are adding new functionality to the Constellation architecture and addressing limitation - for example GetNextWork support was added in 8.8 - you can find more details here https://docs.pega.com/bundle/platform-88/page/platform/user-experience/best-practices-new-and-existing.html
Natwest
GB
@RaghavanSK Yes Raghavan I am aware. GetNextWork is just an example. We can defeat the example but not the wider challenge. In my view, its very early to adopt constellation unless Business is very flexible to its limitations, have appetite to wait for the team's learning curve to get equipped with constellation and PEGA ecosystem is ready with minimum knowledge of how to successfully build a constellation project. I have tried a small POC for one of our projects and decided to stick with theme-cosmos as we have not felt confident about it. But overall I liked the idea of constellation and looking forward to its growth.
Natwest
GB
@RaghavanSK I suggest to have a similar Ask the Expert sessions and LSA webinars for constellation after PEGA academy rolls out a course. I feel many of us have very fundamental questions and can only be fixed by doing hands-on in Academy. Pre-requisite is the good academy course
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@GaneshKumarC16656090 Sure Noted!
Virtusa UK Ltd
GB
@RaghavanSK Is it practical for LSAs to handle constellation without minimum knowledge on ReactJS?
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@GaneshKumarC3200 hope the above reply still answers this question, but to make it more clear citizen developers need not have any knowledge on ReactJS to develop on constellationUI unless you want to build custom components which are not already present.
Virtusa UK Ltd
GB
@RaghavanSK How do we detect security vulnerabilities while creating custom DX components? Any pega recommendations? Does security analyser works for constellation?
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@GaneshKumarC3200 I would recommend to make sure to follow the default eslint configuration rules and not use React api that are not recommended - If you are parsing html, make sure to use a sanitizer - otherwise, it is a good idea to run a complete pen tests on your application before going to production
Updated: 11 Apr 2023 2:19 EDT
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
Hi All,
Let me kick start this session sharing one of my favourite articles around this topic: Prescribed design system. What exactly is a prescribed design system, and how does it relate to the topic at hand, traditional vs. Constellation? Hold on what is this traditional and constellation in the first place? Before answering any of the above questions, will leave you all with the above article on "Prescribed Design is your friend" by one of our designers @lachc :)
Updated: 12 Apr 2023 6:03 EDT
Saltech Consulting
HU
@RaghavanSK Hey, I am a big fan of the new design system and the prescribed design approach, not just because of the efficiency perspective, but I think it will steer design decisions in a more maintanable and smart direction. Even though I see a lot of potential with Constellation, the development of enterprise specific UI assets is not perfectly clear for me.
As far as I understood, low code development in Cosmos React is based on using Rule-UI- assets like Views and Components, that are only editable from the App Studio.
What would be the best practice to develop reusable UI assets that for citizen developers (assuming that there is a requirement that exceeds the capabilites of App Studio)?
In other words what would be the Cosmos React equivalent of creating a generic purpose section and marking it as a relevant record?
I can imagine relying on creating and importing custom components for example, but I am curious if there would be any other approach.
Natwest
GB
@RaghavanSKWill you be able to share the roadmap for rolling out constellation on PEGA strategic frameworks like Customer service, KYC/CLM, Smart Dispute etc.?
Pegasystems Inc.
US
@GaneshKumarC16656090 Pega Customer Service on Constellation will be Generally Available with the upcoming '23 release this Summer. Customer Service on Constellation will initially be targeted for new customers with existing customers looking at it for evolving use cases like self-service and need access to Constellation DX APIs, for example. But we expect adoption to be over time and evolutionary. The Customer Service on UI-KIT application is a solid, proven architecture and is not going anywhere, and Pega will continue investments in that app as well.
For Pega's other strategic applications, we'll reach out to their corresponding Product Management owners to provide similar information. - Thanks!
Sutherland Global
IN
In a section based UI model, we were always able to create reusable sections in the inheritance path and reuse them. For Eg: PremiumCalculation section in Work- can be reused in any of the classes such as Org-Work-Health, Org-Work-Life etc., Constellation being View based system, how do we modularize the views/UI.
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@sai.shnkr Views can still be used the same way, even they belong to same class scope.
Sutherland Global
IN
@RaghavanSK I believe authoring sections for react based applications can be done only via App Studio. In that case, how can we create reusable views on any other classes other than case types.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Hi @sai.shnkr, today in App Studio you can make shared assets in parent cases but there is no way to make shared assets directly in Work-. We also encourage the use of data classes/object for reuse. If you are working with shared objects like that you can easily go and author views or fields in the data section of App Studio.
NCS Pte. Ltd
SG
Hi @RaghavanSK : Thanks for your time to share your knowledge with community. I strongly believe that constellation architecture has a major role in the center-out architecture, but there are lot of hiccups to the engineers to adopt it (the new transformation). Some issues which I noted as below. Can you please help on this with your expertise?
Live UI: I would say Live UI is a great debugging tool for the section based architecture and I couldn't see this in constellation application (I hope this is because of the new view design). I noticed that this document regarding other debugging options but it is not giving valuable information. Is there any plans for Live UI in constellation? Or can the debugging documentations can be updated with samples?
View configuration in Dev Studio: Can help to understand why view configuration are not available in Dev Studio? Lets say if I want to add a new local action for a specific assignment, now need to create it as stage based action and then configure it in the assignment. Also if I want to change a view to a flow action, it is not possible. How to handle these situations?
Thanks.
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@ArulDevan on debugging tools, as you mentioned in above post, we have XRay tool to debug Views, do you have any feedback specific to XRay tool? And yes I noted your feedback around debugging tools documentation, will communicate it to my team.
Updated: 16 Apr 2023 21:16 EDT
NCS Pte. Ltd
SG
Hi @RaghavanSK: XRay tool helps. But the main concern is on the usage. As mentioned earlier, it will be better if the documentation can be updated with some more details.
As far as I noticed, XRay tool can be used by any access groups. Is there a way to limit this?
Thanks.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Hi @ArulDevan, thanks for the feedback!
These are things that we are totally aware of and looking for opportunities to improve.
In terms of "View configuration in Dev Studio" there are scenarios that are contextual to the case you are authoring from which makes it challenging to support Dev Studio view authoring. We are considering options for supporting this.
Coforge
US
@RaghavanSK - A lot of my clients are in the traditional UI (section based UI), will Pega recommend a strategy for applications like these to be migrated to the new UI? Will there be any accelerators or components that can aid in this?
Thanks,
Imran
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@Imranullah-db as discussed in previous posts there is no need to upgrade your old applications to constellations as such. But having said that we do have a strategy to support constellation UI in traditional UI for scenarios like creating new cases, you may soon see some updates on this.
Coforge
US
@RaghavanSK - That is great, looking forward this documentation.
Reliance SMSL LTD
IN
@MarissaRogersHi,My question is...... Suppose we had a list of students marks list and I want to display list of students having marks above 80%.what is the procedure.....
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@VikramS16777036 you can accept parameters on the datapage using which you can filter the records at the datapage source as required..
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Thank you to everyone for an amazing Ask the Expert session on Constellation UI vs Traditional UI!
A huge thank you to our Expert @RaghavanSK and helpers @MaxDeAngelis and @PradeepBoorla
This session is now closed to future replies, if you have questions on Constellation please ask a new question.
Keep an eye on our Ask the Expert homepage for more sessions this year!