More about
Correspondence rules
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After you save the Correspondence form,
click the Preview toolbar button (
) to view an approximate runtime display
of the correspondence in the lower half of the workspace. If
your clipboard contains pages that match those identified in
the Pages & Classes tab,
property values referenced in the correspondence rule appear in
the display.
For examples and additional information about correspondence, see these 
Pega Developer Network articles:
After generation, correspondence items to be sent out are processed in background periodically by the Pega-ProCom agent, which calls the standard activity Assign-Corr.SendCorr. See Understanding the Pega-ProCom agent.
Completed correspondence items are saved as instances of a Data-Corr- class, such as Data-Corr-Email or Data-Corr-Fax. In the normal case, when the correspondence is produced by flow processing, a Link-Attachment instance associates the Data-Corr- instance with the work object.
These standard flow actions support correspondence:
See Atlas — Standard flow actions
In flow rules, you can use the two standard Notify activities named Work.-NotifyAll and Work-NotifyAssignee for correspondence related to an assignment.
Use the standard utility activity named Work-.CorrNew to generate correspondence without any user interaction. When you use this activity to generate e-mail correspondence, you can set parameters so that all work object attachments, or all attachments of one or more specified categories, become attachments to the e-mail message. Optionally, you can send the e-mail to multiple TO: work parties, one or more CC: work parties, and one or more BCC: parties. You can associate a priority level of High or Low with a message, as expected by Microsoft Outlook.
Three standard low-level activities support outgoing e-mail. Typically, these are called only by other standard activities:
In most situations, use only the Work-.CorrNew activity, a notify activity, or a flow action such
as @baseclass.SendCorrespondence rather than calling any of these three
low-level activities directly. This approach assures that
Your application can send digitally signed email messages, providing assurance to the recipients. See How to send digitally signed email.
As an alternative to correspondence rules, you can create correspondence fragments, rules in the Rule-Corr-Fragment rule type. Use fragments for standard text that can be used in many different correspondence rules of different Applies To classes.
For example, you can use a fragment for a standard greeting, introductory or closing paragraph, or footer. By using a fragment copied into the correspondence rule using a <pega:include> JSP tag, you can avoid rewriting and maintaining common text in multiple correspondence rules.
Because correspondence rules are supported by stream processing, you can reference HTML styles or cascading style sheets (CSS files) in a correspondence rule. CSS files can ensure consistency in fonts, font sizes, layout, and appearance, whether final output is formatted by Microsoft Word or by Internet Explorer. Typically, a CSS file is stored in a text file rule (Rule-File-Text rule type)..
For example, you can use the CSS elements
page-break-before and
page-break-after to force page breaks in printed
output. For example, this inline style element
forces a new page:
<H1 style="page-break-before:always">Summary</H1>
Correspondence processing can start Microsoft Word
2000/XP/2003/2007 on the user workstation. It creates temporary
files in the directory identified by the TEMP
Environment variable, typically on the C: drive.
If the TEMP Environment variable does not exist
or refers to a drive other than C:, Process Commander attempts
to create a directory named C:/PegaTemp. If this
is unsuccessful, it displays an error message and
correspondence editing fails.
When you save a correspondence rule, the system converts HTML and JSP tags (or directives) to Java source code. As a learning or debugging aid, you can review this Java code.
Click the Show Java toolbar button
(
) to see to see the system-generated Java
code that implements the correspondence rule. The window
presents a read-only preview of the Java that implements this
rule instance. This Java code is not identical to the Java that
executes at runtime, which includes Java code inlined from
other rule instances and reflects rules in the requestor's
RuleSet list.
Through directed inheritance, the immediate parent class of the Rule-Obj-Corr class (and of similar classes containing HTML text) is the Rule-Stream class, not the Rule-Obj- class.
