Using the Clipboard tool

The Clipboard tool displays two panels:

• The left panel displays, for a selected Thread, the page structures in a hierarchical tree format. As you interact with Designer Studio, you create new Threads in a variety of ways. These include starting user portals, opening rules or landing pages in portal tabs, or creating work items in a process or a wizard.
• The right panel contains the names and values of Single Value, Value List, and Value Group properties and messages for one page selected in the left panel.

To interact with the clipboard:

1. Select a Thread from the Clipboard header. Every Thread in your requestor session has a clipboard context. Each open tab on the Designer Studio has a dedicated Thread. Thread names correspond to their tab names; work item Threads are identified by their IDs. By default, the thread for the selected tab appears when you open the clipboard.
2. Select an aggregate object in the left panel, which may be of mode Page, Page List, Page Group, Value List, or Value Group.
3. Review or interact using menus and links in either panel.

Refreshing the contents on the clipboard

Your clipboard resides in memory on the server. As you interact with the Clipboard tool at your workstation, you see a static snapshot copy of your clipboard. You can send the latest clipboard contents to your workstation for a single page or for all pages on the clipboard.

To access and redisplay a single aggregate property and its elements, select a page on the page tree in the left panel and do one of the following:

• Right click the selected page in the tree and click Refresh Page on the menu.
• Click the Refresh button at the top of the right panel.

Information in the top-level page containing the currently selected property is refreshed, and the current property remains selected. If the property currently selected (or a containing page) was removed and is no longer present in the clipboard, a message appears.

Review page structure in the left panel

The left panel presents the entire clipboard for the currently selected Thread as a tree, growing from the left.

Click a name or expand arrow to display any node in the left panel to view the page structure it contains. Click again or click a collapse arrow to hide) the pages within a page.

The clipboard contains three groups of pages:

• User Pages — Top-level pages created by your normal processing, sorted alphabetically by page name. You can add user pages to facilitate testing; see Adding a user page to the clipboard.
• Data Pages — Read-only data pages (created if necessary when accessed, defined by data pages rules).
• Linked Property Pages — Read-only pages retrieved because a harness, section, flow action or other rule contained a property reference based on a linked property. These pages are read-only, and never updated. They are removed automatically whenever your requestor performs any Commit operation.
• System Pages — Top-level created pages created during authentication. These correspond to the organization, division, access group, application rule, and organization unit of the operator. None of the pages are available to guest users.

Three single, system-maintained pages are always present and are displayed when you click the Show Advanced link at the bottom of the tree:

• pxThread — Known as the Thread page, it provides the context of clipboard. See
• pxRequestor — Known as the requestor page, it contains information about your access roles, RuleSet list, and HTTP protocol parameters.
• pxProcess — Known as the process page, it contains information about the server's Java Virtual Machine and operating system.

Each top-level page may contain other pages that in turn may contain other pages, and so on. For most pages, the class of the page appears in parentheses after the page name and a single space. (For group and list properties, additional parentheses appear around subscripts.)

Every embedded page is defined by a property. Properties of mode Page , Page Group , and Page List may appear as embedded on the clipboard. Pages may contain properties (of any mode) and messages.

The branch structure of the tree in the left panel directly corresponds to the fully qualified name of a property reference. For example, the property reference:

pyWorkPage.pxFlow(VacationRequest).pyConfirmationNote

identifies a Single Value property named pyConfirmationNote embedded on a page named pxFlow("VacationRequest"), an element of a Page Group named pxFlow on the top-level user page named pyWorkPage.

Square brackets and the term [Refers to ..] indicate a reference property. The text in the square brackets identifies the non-reference page.

Using the Tools menu

Click the Tools menu on the Clipboard header to do the following:

• Select Analyze to review a tabular report showing the approximate size in kilobytes of each clipboard page, the page name and class, the number of accesses (read or update), and date and time of the last access, and passivation history. See Understanding passivation and requestor timeouts.
  
  If the Collect Details mode is enabled, the display contains stack traces showing how pages were created or deleted and historical information about pages no longer on the clipboard.

• Select Collect Details to enable, or disable, automatic collection of detailed clipboard size and access information. A check mark next to this menu option indicates that data collection is active. A pop-up window confirms your menu action.
  
  While enabled, select the Analyze Clipboard option to review the size and use of each page on the clipboard, including pages that were removed during the data collection period.

Note: To eliminate unnecessary processing, disable this facility except when you need the additional detail it provides.

Using right-click command menu

You can perform the following right-click commands on a page you select in the tree. Options that update the clipboard are available only to users who have the hold the clipboardViewerUpdate privilege.

Review property values in the right panel

When you select a page in the left panel, all Value List, Value Group, and Single Value properties on that page appear in the right panel, sorted by property name. Property messages appear in red text.

Click a property name to open its form in Designer Studio.

Values of TextEncrypted properties are encrypted. They appear as blank in this display.

The following options are available in the right panel.

Option	Description
Refresh	Click to cause the Clipboard tool to access and redisplay the properties on the current page.
Edit	Select to add a single value property to a page, modify an editable property value, or delete an editable property from the page. When you select Edit the following occurs: Editable property values appear in text boxes The Add option appears above the properties list The Delete icon ( ) appears at the end of a row containing an editable property When you are finished with your edits, click Save to keep your updates and save the page to the database, or click Cancel to cancel them. Note: You cannot edit a read-only data page outside of the data page load and post-activity process.
Add	To add a single value property to a page, select the Edit option, select a row in the list, and click Add. Enter the property name and value in the Add properties dialog box. Note: You cannot add an embedded property.
Save	This option is available when you click Edit. Click Save to save your updated page to the database. Caution: Pega 7 Platformdoes not validate properties on the page. This action can introduce invalid data into the database.
	This option is available when you click Edit. Select a row containing an editable property and click to delete it from the page.
Discard	This option is available when you click Edit. Click Discard to cancel your updates.
Actions	Click to select either the Show XML or Execute Activity commands as described previously.

Caution: Changing your clipboard contents or structure may affect the integrity of your system or your application results. Change clipboard values with this tool only in a debugging situation. Deleting properties or saving altered pages may introduce invalid data into the database.

Searching for properties or values on the clipboard

Use the search tool located at the top of the right panel to find properties or known text values as follows:

1. In the Find box, type the full or partial search term for a property name or value. As a best practice, refresh the page or the clipboard before starting the search. The search is performed on your current clipboard, which may be more up to date than the contents in the Clipboard tool display on your workstation.
2. In the Pages box, select a page name or All Pages.
3. Press the Enter keyboard key to start the process. The system searches the (internal representation of) property names and values at all levels, and reports the full name, property reference, and the value (or a segment of the value, if the value is longer than 60 characters).
4. A Search Results dialog appears and displays the results. To filter them, click the down arrow next to a header to open the filter dialog.

Note: You cannot search for blanks, non-printing characters or null values. Also, the text of Page-Message clipboard elements is not searched.

Note: Some clipboard values are Base64-encoded text representing binary objects, such as JPG image files, Word DOC files, or compiled programs. You can't search for a word that appears on the image or within the DOC file.

Page Messages

Clipboard page names with errors appear in red text on the left panel. Click the name to view messages associated with properties on this page in the right panel.

A message is a text clipboard value, generated by the system and associated with a property or a page. A message can convey error conditions, progress, or exceptions to a user.

Although messages appear as values on the clipboard, they are not defined through properties. A clipboard page containing messages generally cannot be saved into the database, as the message typically indicates that the page (or a property on it) is invalid. The value of a property might not meet the requirements of a permanent instance of the page's class because of missing or incorrect data.

Ordinary messages are associated with a single property and value. They might indicate that the property value is not valid. Page messages are associated with an entire page.

When a workstation user submits an HTML form to Pega 7 Platform, previous page messages corresponding to the input are cleared, and property messages are cleared for any value that changed.

Measuring the size of the clipboard

The Clipboard display shows the contents of the clipboard, but not its size in bytes. Large clipboards can affect performance because memory in the Java Virtual Machine supporting Pega 7 Platform holds the clipboards of all requestors.

• You can use the Performance tool to see the size of your clipboard in bytes, or to track the growth and contraction of your clipboard over time. In the Tools bar, select Tools Menu, and then click the Add Reading with Clipboard Size link.
• Using the System Management Application (SMA), you can learn the size of each requestor's clipboards, and the size of each page. Start the SMA using Designer Studio > System > Operations > System Management Application. Select a node, then click the Requestor Management menu item.

Properties and pages not found on the clipboard

The following items are not visible on the clipboard:

• Properties with Internal status ( properties with names that start with pz). These standard properties support internal Pega 7 Platform operations. To view these properties you can override the @baseclass.pyShowInternalProperty when rule or right-click in the left panel and select Show XML.
• Primary pages of some activities. The parameter page of an activity. Use the Tracer to view these pages.
• Properties of mode Java Object, Java Object Group, and Java Object List.
• Named pages referenced by the rules in the current and built-on applications. Use the Undefined Pages landing page or Tracer to view these pages.
• Data Pages referenced by the rules in the current and built-on applications. Use the Data Pages landing page to view these pages.

Note: The Application page contains much, but not all, of the properties that make up the requestor's application rule.

Related information

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