Application Settings feature

Before an application is live, it moves through many environments. Typically, applications go through development, staging, QA, and production. When migrating an application from one server or environment to another, references to the external systems connected to the application (such as endpoint URLs and JNDI servers) typically change. The information required to connect to these external systems must be modified, depending on your environment.

A stock trading company has a Pega Platform™ application that points to a web service for stock pricing data and an email server to send notifications to users by email.

In the following image, click the + icons to identify why Application Settings are needed.

The previous example provides only two sets of settings, but an application could have dozens of connectors and setting information. You do not want to have to remember all of the different resources and update the environment information for each one individually. The risk is that you might miss one or two settings and delay the application going live.

To avoid missing a setting, use the Application Settings feature to reference the external systems by environment. Application Settings allow you to define values for settings that can vary depending on the environment without updating integration rules and data instances. Application Settings can have a Value type of text, boolean, enumerated list, or class.

In this pattern, you create a new Application Setting that contains the configuration settings for an integration that has values able to change from one environment to the next. You then have your resources access the D_pxGetApplicationSettingValue data page to load those settings.