Understanding the Pega-ProCom agents

The activity System-Queue-ServiceLevel.ProcessEvents supports service level processing for both assignments and work objects. Enable this row of the Agent Schedule form unless your applications use only non-BPM rules-engine facilities.

This agent uses the queuing facility introduced in V5.4 for higher throughput. Flow processing creates queue entries (instances of the System-Queue-ServiceLevel class) and the activity dequeues them and processes them.

By default, this activity starts every 30 seconds; you can choose a higher or lower interval.

You can update three standard settings rules to control how many assignments the agent processes in a batch and other parameters. See Pega Developer Network article PRKB-25249 Understanding service levels and System Settings for the Pega-ProCom agent.

The activity Assign-.AgentBulkProcessing supports background processing of flow actions in bulk against assignments, when requested through the bulk processing feature of the Process Work workspace of the WorkUser portal. See WorkManager portal — Processing assignments in bulk.

Enable this row of the Agent Schedule form to allow managers to process assignments in background.

This activity is designed to detect and work around locked work objects, enable this row on only one node (of a multinode cluster) unless this causes your system to have unwanted long delays in background bulk processing. Increasing the number of simultaneously executing copies of this activity may not increase throughput in proportion, because of contention for locks.

The activity Data-Corr-.Send supports outgoing e-mail if your system contains one or more Email Account data instances with a second key part of Notify.

This agent uses the queuing facility introduced in V5.4, allowing the agent to run on multiple nodes without risk of locking or deadlock issues, for higher throughput.

See the Pega Developer Network articles PRKB-25086 How outbound email works and PRKB-25089 How to set up outbound email.

The activity Assign-Archive.ProcessAssignments performs periodic processing to delete selected work objects, work object history, and work object attachment, based on schedules and criteria that application users record using the Purge/Archive wizard. See About the Purge/Archive wizard.

The activity @baseclass.getConvertedPDFsfromPDM requests that the PegaDISTRIBUTION Manager send a converted Portable Document Format (PDF) file to the Process Commander server. The agent then attaches the document as a file attachment to the original work object, using an attachment category identified in the earlier parameter to the standard activity Work-.ConvertAttachmentToPDF.

Enable the row containing this activity if your application uses the PegaDISTRIBUTION Manager (PDM) and COS to convert Word DOC attachments to PDF format.

If the optional Unit Test Manager is enabled, the activity Rule-AutoTest-Case.RunTestSuitesFromAgent performs testing that is defined in testing suites. The default interval is 10 minutes. See About the Unit Test Manager.

This agent is deprecated for V5.3 and later but remains available for backwards compatibility.

In versions before V5.3, the Incoming Mail tab of email account instances was used to configure e-mail accounts that managed incoming e-mail and this activity, @baseclass.Email_CheckIncoming, processed incoming email messages.

As a best practice, configure and use emailservices (rather than the email account approach) to manage incoming e-mail. See About the Email Accelerator rather than email account instances. If you implement the email services approach, do not enable this agent.