If you develop Pega 7 Platform mobile apps, you must follow certain guidelines and be aware of some special considerations to enable mobile apps to work in offline mode.

• Enable offline capability in your access groups and cases
• Use supported controls
• Use supported actions
• Flow processing considerations
• Other considerations

For more information, see Offline capability.

Enable offline capability in your access groups and cases

Keep the following information in mind while enabling offline capability for your access groups and cases:

• You enable offline capability for an access group by selecting the Enable offline support check box on its Advanced tab.
• You must enable offline capability for each case. Select the Enable offline support check box on the case's Advanced tab.
• After offline capability is enabled, you can make individual assignments within that case while working offline. Screen flows that are a part of the case can also be performed while offline. For more information, see Flow processing considerations.
• A single offline-ready application can support both online-only and offline-ready cases. The online-only cases will still be available in the mobile app, but a user can only create or make assignments or edit them while online.
• The following restrictions apply:
  • Case stage transitions are not supported while working offline.
  • Circumstanced application rules are not supported.
• You must build a mobile app by using the Mobile tab of the application rule form. For more information, see How to build and brand a hybrid mobile application.
• If you create a new case type, it uses dynamic views by default, which will not work in offline mode. Therefore, be sure to create a case type that uses a regular harness with a regular section instead.
• The login rule for all offline-enabled apps must be based on the Web-Login rule found in the Pega-EndUserUI ruleset. This rule contains all the necessary user interface items and references to scripts used by the offline-enabled apps.

You can create your own portal for offline capability, as long as it uses some of the key principles and design of the pyCaseWorker portal. For more information, see Composite portal and Creating a composite portal. A portal that is based on the Case Worker portal (such as pyCaseWorker) has the following requirements:

• It is not available by default in the Pega 7 Platform. You need to add the UI-Kit-7 ruleset to the application stack - see Using the UI Kit ruleset, for more information.
• Must be set as the default for every access group whose users access the offline-enabled application.
• Must use a frameless dynamic container.
• The harness in the portal must be defined in the Data-Portal class.
• Must adhere to the following guidelines.

Use supported controls

When developing a mobile app for offline capability, you must build every screen by using modern layouts and lists. For a complete list of supported controls that can be used while creating the user interface, see Supported controls when working offline.

Use supported actions

Buttons, links, icons, and menu items must use only the supported set of actions. For a complete list of actions that are supported while working offline, see Supported actions when working offline.

Flow processing considerations

You must use cases in flows. For more information, see Flow processing in offline mode.

Other considerations

The following information is important to know while using the mobile offline capability:

• Case objects are now available in offline mode:
  • When a case is marked for offline use, there is a new field for adding a data page that contains the list of case objects to send to the client for offline use. Any case in this list that is synced will be available offline.
  • However, if this data page misses a case that a user needs, when the user goes to online mode and attempts to open a case that is marked for offline and that case is not available locally on the device, the client retrieves the case from the server. The case is then on the client when the user goes offline.
• A new landing page lists various configurations that must be performed for the offline mobile app. To access this landing page, click Designer Studio > Mobile > Offline.
• To improve performance, large data pages are supported for storing reference data for offline use. For a large data page, only the changed records are synchronized when the application goes online.
• For regular data pages, the following data sync limitation applies:
  • The data page size cannot be larger than 8,000,000 characters.
  • Because the string is UTF-8 encoded, this size represents approximately 7.6 MB if all the character codes are between 1 and 128 (for languages such as English, German, or French).
• You can extend the app by using a CallActivity extension point. For more information, see callActivity action as an extension.
• If the Pega 7 Platform was installed on an Oracle WebLogic application web server, make sure to manually enable preemptive authentication, because it is disabled by default. Set the following Oracle SOA 11g partnerlink binding property to 'true':
  oracle.webservices.preemptiveBasicAuth=true
• You can include external scripts in one of the following ways:
  • Add a custom script by saving the pypega_ui_userscripts_offline script bundle to the application ruleset, and then add your script files to this bundle.
  • Save the script as a JavaScript file named pypega_ui_userscript_offline to the application ruleset, and then add custom JavaScript functions to it.
• When using defer load support:
  • The defer loaded sections or layouts are loaded on the initial load, and the defer load preactivity is always ignored.
  • Defer load is not supported in tabs. You must use a layout group instead.