Service-level agreements -

Records can be created in various ways. You can add a new record to your application or copy an existing one. You can specialize existing rules by creating a copy in a specific ruleset, against a different class or (in some cases) with a set of circumstance definitions. You can copy data instances but they do not support specialization because they are not versioned.

Create a service-level agreement by selecting Service-level agreement from the Process category.

Key parts

A service-level agreement has two key parts:

Field Description
Apply to Select a class to which this service-level agreement applies, typically a subclass of the Work- base class or Assign- base class.

The list of available class names depends on the ruleset you select. Each class can restrict applying rules to an explicit set of rulesets as specified on the Advanced tab of the class form.

Identifier Enter a name for this service-level agreement. Begin the name with an alphabetic character, and use only letters, numbers, and hyphens.

You can override a standard service-level agreement in your application to fit the needs of your application. However, overriding, rather than choosing a distinct name in the

Identifier

field, may in some cases make it difficult to detect and debug whether the standard rule or the rule you created is executing. For example, if you override the standard rule Work-.NotifyManager in your application RuleSet version Alpha:04-01-23 with a rule Alpha-Finance-Order.NotifyManager, the Pega-ProCom agent may nonetheless execute the standard rule rather than your rule as desired, unless this agent has an appropriate access group that provides access to Alpha:04-01-23.

Note: Choose both key parts of a service-level agreement carefully, especially on systems hosting multiple applications. Normally, the Pega-ProCom agent evaluates service-level agreements. This agent typically has access to RuleSets from all applications on the entire system.

When two service-level agreements in different RuleSets are both named Delta-Work-Object-.Platinum (for example), the Pega-ProCom agent finds and executes onlyone of the two, the one that appears in the RuleSet that is higher on the agent's RuleSet list.

Rule resolution

When searching for instances of this rule type, the system uses full rule resolution which:

  • Filters candidate rules based on a requestor's ruleset list of rulesets and versions
  • Searches through ancestor classes in the class hierarchy for candidates when no matching rule is found in the starting class
  • Finds circumstance-qualified rules that override base rules
  • Finds time-qualified rules that override base rules