Ravi Kumar Blog Posts

The Certified Pega Decisioning Consultant (CPDC) certification is for professionals participating in the design and development of a Pega Customer Decision Hub solution. This certification ensures you have the skills to apply design principles of Decision Strategies, Next-Best-Action, as well as Predictive Analytics. The CPDC 7.4 exam includes multiple choice questions(63 questions in 90 mins) and the pass mark is 70%. Prerequisites: Pega Decisioning Consultant 7.4 course from Pega community site Pega Decisioning Consultant 7.4 Practice Exam from the Pega community site Below are the exam Topics (% of exam) while preparing: Next-Best-Action (19%) Decision Strategy (33%) Decision Simulations (8%) Predictive Analytics (40%) After getting the above info, I started preparing for the exam in a plan and here is my way of preparation. 1) First 2 weeks, I have focused on the course to read all the topics and finished all the sample exercises from the cloud environment. Da...

Finally I was successful in integrating Alexa with Pega V7.4 PE. Though it looks simple but is tricky to setup the configuration from both Alexa and Pega side. To perform this whole PoC, we need to install the AlexaChannel component from Pega and do the connection settings accordingly. Using developer.alexa.com site, we need to create a skill (eg: account balance) and the corresponding intents to finish the Build Model from Alexa. Once we are done, we need to call our Pega API service (REST) call from Alexa using Endpoint configuration and we are done to test the skill using Alexa developer console => Test menu. Once you start typing the command in that console (eg:balance, what is my balance etc), Alexa calls Pega REST API and respond to the asked commands. Pega V7.4 side configuration ·         After installation of “AlexaChannel_20180703T133432007” package/component from PDN, we need to add it in our Application rule and make sure ...

Build a Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant™ (IVA) for Web Chatbot by adding the training tasks to the model. You can createa sample training data, map the entities, add the training data to the model, and when ready, rebuild the model. In this post we can focus on how to add several instances of same user input to train the model so that IVA for Web Chatbot improves how it responds to the text you enter, using artificial intelligence. Here are the steps to follow: 1) Create the "Insurance Quote" case type that is related to a car insurance quote. 2) Add data types for a car insurance quote such as color, make, model, registration date, VIN (vehicle identification number), and model year. 3) Make sure to instantiate a "Web Chatbot" (Eg:Web Chat) interface from Application Menu => Channels and interfaces landing page. Add the case type in the Content section with a create case command of "insurance".  Make sure to enable the Text Analyzer's ...

A brief overview of Kafa platform: Apache Kafka is a streaming platform which enables users to publish data and also subscribe to different streams of records. Kafka stores the streams in a fault tolerant way. It is used to build reliable real-time streaming data pipelines. Further, it runs as a cluster and implements the concept of topics or feed name which records are published to. Kafka has great performance, and it is stable, provides reliable durability, has a flexible publish-subscribe/queue that scales well with N-number of consumer groups, has robust replication, provides Producers with tunable consistency guarantees, and it provides preserved ordering. Usecase#1: App Analytics Realtime Dashboard (AARD) Develop a scalable system which can do real-time analytics for different health applications. The occurrence of different health conditions can be regarded as the complex events and thus this concept can be extended to other use cases easily. Large number of users s...

When I was checking for something in the Report Definition rules, I got a rule: pxLoadRelevantRecordsForRecord . This report is used to pull all the active records from the system based on the context class. With this report, we can list out all the Inactive rules for our application specific class and cross check them before deletion from the system. We can build a small utility sat for example: RemoveInactiveRecords and from this activity we can call this final RD rule and pass the necessary parameters to pull the inactive list of rules instances. Once we get the list on the clipboard page, we can build the clean-up logic in the same activity or another activity to do that. The highlighted filter drives whether we need active or inactive records. Similarly, we can pass the parameter to the column: pxContextClass (Eg:Data-) from the utility by using “ Call Rule-Obj-Report-Definition.pxRetrieveReportData ”. See below for more details on how to call and pass the parameters to this R...

Till now we used datapages to fetch and store the data for later uses. Pega did add an extra feature: Savable Datapage ( Pega V74 and later ) which is to save the data using a datapage. We can define a data page to save data to a system of record by using save plans. By using save plans, you can save the updated information after without an activity. Reference: https://community.pega.com/sites/default/files/help_v82/procomhelpmain.htm#rule-/rule-declare-/rule-declare-pages/dm-savable-data-pages-con.htm Sample Usecase: Assume that we are getting customer details like Account Number, Address, Phone Number etc., from an external database. User has the ability to change the address/phone#. Once the user updates any of the details, we need to update the external database. Without Savable datapage: We use a datapage to store the customer details to avoid multiple calls for the same data (if needed multiple times). Whenever the details are changed we use an activity logic to sen...

Microservices are a software development technique—a variant of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely coupled services.The benefit of decomposing an application into different smaller services is that it improves modularity. This makes the application easier to understand, develop, test, and become more resilient to architecture erosion. In a microservices architecture, services are fine-grained and the protocols are lightweight. For more details, check the internet. This is a simple exercise to run a sample Pega microservice code using postman API testing tool (3rd party to run REST api-services). To run this exercise, we need to have a local Pega PE running and the PE would need a sample application running with a Case type and all. Before running the Pega PE, make sure to have postman tool running in the machine. To download the postman tool, follow this site: https://www.getpostman.com/. Chec...