Pega Certified System Architect key terms

A template that defines the goal, stages, steps, data, and rules for one kind of work an organization handles, such as an insurance claim or a service request. Every case created from it follows that design.

A major phase in a case lifecycle, such as Intake, Review, or Resolve. Stages group related steps, can run in parallel, and drive the case's overall progress and status.

A unit inside a stage that contains one or more processes. It represents a discrete piece of work and can be marked optional or configured to run at the same time as other steps.

In Pega, an ordered sequence of shapes inside a flow that performs one specific piece of work, such as collecting information from a user or sending a notification.

A diagram that models the sequence of shapes - assignments, decisions, subprocesses - that a case follows to complete a process. Flows determine the path work takes from start to end.

A unit of work that must be completed by a person or an automation. It appears in a worklist or workbasket and can carry a service-level agreement and routing instructions.

A rule attached to an assignment or case that defines goal, deadline, and passed intervals, plus the actions Pega takes at each milestone, such as escalating or notifying a manager.

The rules that decide who receives an assignment. Routing can send work to a worklist, a workbasket, a specific operator, or a group selected by skill.

A shared queue of assignments that any member of an assigned work group can open and work on. It is used when work should not be owned by a single person.

The personal list of assignments assigned to one operator. Items remain there until they are completed, transferred, or reassigned to someone else.

A rule that evaluates conditions against rows of values and returns the result from the first matching row. Rows are evaluated in order from top to bottom.

A rule that models branching logic as a tree of comparisons. Each node evaluates a condition and directs evaluation down a branch until a result value is reached.

A Boolean rule that returns true or false and is used to control visibility, validation, flow branching, and other behavior without writing custom code.

The algorithm Pega uses to choose the best rule instance for the current situation, weighing class inheritance, circumstancing, ruleset version, and rule availability.

Pega organizes rules into classes. A case type's class inherits rules from parent classes through pattern inheritance (based on name) and directed inheritance, so shared behavior is defined once.

Defining a variation of a rule that applies only when specified properties or conditions match, so one rule can serve many situations without duplicating logic.

A mechanism that stops two users from editing the same case simultaneously by holding a lock on the case until the current transaction finishes.

A case created and linked to a parent case so work can be split up, run in parallel, or handled by a different process. The parent can wait when a dependency requires it.

A rule that defines a reusable data structure with its properties and sources, used to model reference data such as customers, products, or addresses. It is backed by a data class.

A named rule that loads and caches data for use across cases. It can hold a single page or a list, and its scope controls how long the cached data is kept.

A data page configured so that edits made in the application are written back to the source system, letting users change and persist reference data.

A rule that maps values between properties, such as copying data from a data page into a case or setting defaults, using a sequence of actions like set, append, and update.

The integration rule that defines how Pega retrieves or sends data, for example a REST connector, a database table, or a report. Data pages and data types reference it.

A rule that defines the columns, filters, grouping, and sorting for a report over case or data class records. It can drive landing pages, exports, and dashboards.

The in-memory structure of pages and property values for a running request or case. Developers inspect it to see current values and understand where data is stored.

A reusable UI rule that groups fields, layouts, and other content to form part of a form. Sections are included inside harnesses and flow actions.

The UI rule that defines the overall frame of a form for a case, including layout, header, and available actions. Different harnesses can serve different contexts.

A rule that defines the screen and processing logic for one step of a flow. It determines what the user sees and what happens when the user submits.

In the Constellation architecture, a configurable definition of the fields and layout for a form or step, rendered by the application's UI framework instead of a harness.

A container that arranges fields in rows and columns and can change its arrangement responsively or conditionally based on screen size or property values.

A condition, usually a when rule or expression, that controls whether a field, section, or action is displayed to the user in the interface.

A rule that ties an operator to a set of roles, an application, and a default portal. It establishes what a user can do and where they land after login.

A named collection of privileges and permissions that grants specific abilities to users who receive it through their access group.

A named permission that rules and access settings can check to allow or deny a specific capability, such as running a particular action or using a feature.

A rule that grants a role a set of permissions - read, write, delete, execute - on a class, or on instances of that class that meet a stated condition.

Access decisions driven by conditions evaluated against data values, such as letting a manager see only cases from their own department, expressed in access-when conditions.

The record that identifies an individual user, holding their name, credentials, access groups, and personal preferences.

The process of verifying a user's identity before granting access, for example through built-in login, LDAP, SAML, or OpenID Connect.

A setting that stores sensitive property values encrypted at rest using a cipher, so the data cannot be read directly outside the application.