Back Forward Designer Studio — Working with the What's Happening display

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The What's Happening display (sometimes called the Newsfeed) enables developers working on an application, even if they are physically distributed, to monitor each other's work and progress in near-real-time through a streaming display. Two types of event messages that appear in the display:

Messages pertaining to the current application are visible to other developers working on the same application. The display is limited to 25 messages, the most recent appears at the top of the list. Periodically refresh the Designer Studio to see the most recent messages.

What's Happening messages are read-only records and cannot be deleted from the display.

 What's Happening messages

The What's Happening display shows the following:

Item

Description
Operator image

The operator image, as defined in the Operator ID instance, appears on the left side of a message. When an image is updated, it replaces the existing image in that operator's previous messages.

Rule actions

These automatically generated messages notify application developers that a rule is checked in, checked out, or deleted.

Information includes the operator name, type of action, the rule name, and the time elapsed since the event was recorded (as of the last display refresh). Checked-in rules include the check-in comment.

Here is an example of a checked-in flow rule:

Click the rule name link to open the rule. Deleted rules do not contain a link.

Checked-in or checked-out flow messages include a flow image. Click it to display a full-size diagram in a separate window. When a flow diagram has been modified and checked in, the new diagram replaces the existing diagram in previous messages.

Deleted data instances such as Operator ID, organization, access group, and so on do not appear in What's Happening.

Shared RuleSet versions

If a RuleSet version is shared by applications, any rule actions in that RuleSet are seen by developers in those applications. For example, assume OrderEntry:01-01-01 belongs to application Alpha and application Beta. When a developer in application Alpha checks out a flow rule (in that RuleSet), developers in application Beta will also see the rule action in their What's Happening displays (when Beta is the current application).
Comments

Text messages entered by users. To create a message, enter text (1000 character limit) in the field at the bottom of the display and click Post. Here is an example:

Comments are displayed to all users whose current application shares the same name key.Waiting for verification from Ray Wang on this 3/19/10 pashm
Show Filters / Hide Filters Use this link to show or hide the message filter checkboxes. Filters control what types of messages appear in your What's Happening display.

A selected checkbox indicates that the filter is disabled. By default, all checkboxes are selected and all events are displayed. To filter a message type, clear the checkbox, which hides the message in the display.

The filters are:

  • Reqs and Use Cases — Application requirement and use case rule actions
  • Flows — Flow rule actions
  • Posts — Messages posted by application developers
  • All Other Rules — Rule actions not otherwise filtered
  • Feedback — Not used

 Using Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

What's Happening messages are available as an industry-standard RSS feed that can be presented by any RSS reader, such as the Google reader, Atom, or Microsoft Outlook.

Team members and interested parties who are not currently logged in to the development system can access these messages using the RSS feed. The feed contains rule action messages (check in, check out, and delete) and comments. It does not provide direct access to the system.

The messages are system-wide (from all applications) and appear to all RSS subscribers. The number of messages is limited to 1000.

  1. RSS configurationTo subscribe to the feed, click the RSS icon. This opens the Subscribe to the Feed dialog.
  2. Modify the values to suit your requirements and click Subscribe.
  1. The link appears in your reader's RSS list.
  2. From within the system, click the RSS icon to display the messages in a separate window.

 Implementation

Events are instances of the Pega-Events class and other classes derived from the Pega-Events class. Instances of this class are by default saved in the pc_events database table.

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