PEGA TUTORIALWhat are different Operator Roles in PEGA?

This article is next in series of our learning PEGA. In the first article we learnt what is PEGA and the subsequent articles talked about WorkType and WorkItem concepts in PEGA. We also learnt what are business rules in PEGA? In this post we will examine what are Operators and their roles in PEGA?

In any project team we have different team members playing different roles. There are project manager, business analyst, architects, designers, developers, testers, quality analyst etc in the team to who play different role in the team.

Anyone who can login into PEGA PRPRC system is called Operator. Each of the operators has an Operator ID and password and they are attached to a access group.

In PEGA PRPC system there are seven pre-defined standard roles. These are following

1. Work users
2. Work Managers
3. Business Analyst
4. System Architects
5. Project Managers
6. System Administrators
7. Executive Sponsors

Every role has its own portal. A business analyst role requires capturing requirements and design process and workflow for the application. To perform their role business analyst goes to the Business Architect Portal.

A System Architects or application developer need to design the user interface, business logic, process rules etc. so they go to Designer studio portal to do their work.

An End user or work user is one who actually uses the application. The end user has their own Case Worker portal where they go and create work items.

A Work Manager goes to the Case Manager Portal to approve or reject the works submitted by the work users.

PEGA PRPC system allows us to create additional roles.

Please visit PEGA Tutorials section for articles on PEGA and PRPC

PEGA TutorialWhat are Business Rules in PEGA?

This article is next in series of our learning PEGA. In the last two articles we learn what is PEGA and what are Work Type and Work Items in PEGA. In this post we will learn what are Business Rules in PEGA? In the traditional programming such as Java, .NET or C++ we use IF-ELSE-THEN or WHERE or WHILE to evaluate a property or data to make decisions. In PEGA we achieve it through Business Rules.

Business Rules are set of policies and principles that are applied by an organization to conduct business. There are set of rules setup by the company to conduct business. For example: A Bank might setup a rule to give XX amount of loan to people who have an annual income of $ 100,000 and credit score of > 700.

How to define Business Rule in PRPC?

Just like an Organization defines rules to conduct business PRPC provides functionalities to define business rule.

• Decision tree,
• Decision table,
• Map value
• When

Decision Tree: Decision tree is similar to IF-ELSE-THEN evaluation criteria we have in traditional programming. We can apply any number of criteria to evaluate the conditions. The works from Left to Right and Top to bottom. When a particular condition is meet the evaluation process is stopped. If none of the conditions are meeting a default or other value is return back to the calling function.

Decision Table: Decision table are similar to our SQL Tables where we apply WHERE clause to put conditions. We can write more than one condition. The table returns number of rows that meet the specific criteria.

Map Value: As per PRPC rule book Map Value allows us to look at one or two properties over any number of conditions to return any number of results. Map values only support two properties which can be evaluated.

When: Business Rule can be defined using When functionality. When functionality can evaluate any number of conditions. It works in similar fashion as IF-THEN-ELSE. It returns either True of false after evaluation.

Please visit PEGA Tutorials section for articles on PEGA and PRPC

PEGA TutorialWhat are WorkType and WorkItem in PEGA?

What is it that an Organization does? The answer is every organization do some Work to accomplish their objective or vision or mission. A work in any organization is done by the people and applications. People create, receive, route, report and resolve work.

In PEGA, Work Type is fundamental unit of work that is process by the people or applications. Each of the work has their own attribute or set of principle or steps to follow. To understand it more clearly let us take an example of a Bank. Bank is an organization and it does some work like providing loan, opening account, doing transaction etc. So, each of this work is a WorkType from PEGA prospective.

Now for each of the WorkType there are systematic processes that need to be followed. In case of Loan, a person who wishes to apply for loan has to submit a loan application with the bank. This Loan application is called WorkItem in PEGA world. So, WorkItem is the unique instance of work.

Please visit PEGA Tutorials section for articles on PEGA and PRPC

PEGA TutorialWhat is PEGA?

PEGA is one of the finest BPM Tool available today in the industry. BPM Tools helps an organization to achieve work productivity and efficiency by providing process automation. BPM or Business Process Management is combination of Policies, metrics, methods, management practice and Software tools to manage and continuously optimize an organization activities and processes.

PEGA is a platform which provide a systematic approach to build and deploy process-oriented and rule based solutions and applications. Business Process Management, Customer relationship management, Decision management and case management areas are some of the examples where processes and rules are integral part of solution or application.
What PEGA provides to a developer is a Designer studio which acts as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to build applications. The best part is this Designer studio is web based so a developer can work and create solutions from anywhere in the world.

PEGA main focus are Processes. If you are planning to learn PEGA or if you are already working with PEGA tools you should keep this in mind is "Process is King, Queen and everything in PEGA". Every business solution is process oriented.

Technically PEGA is not a language or database or operating system. What PEGA provides us is a framework which is process driven; everything that we do in traditional programming such as designing user interfaces, writing business logic, applications logic, creating physical and logical mode of databases etc. we do the same thing in PEGA. The difference lies between PEGA and traditional programming is that in PEGA to build or develop anything (UI, data access logics, validation rules etc) there are processes and gadgets that we have to use.

In the heart of PEGA is PRPC server (PegaRULES Process Commander®) which provides the platform and interfaces to business analyst, system analyst and developers to design and build applications in PEGA. The main focus in PEGA is on automation of works and program code.

PRPC server is written in Java. To setup PRPC server to function smoothly we need an Operating System, a Java application server, a database and Java JDK.

PEGA is not the only BPM Tool available in the market place. The other popular BPM Tools as per Forrester reports are following:

• Appian_7
• Bizagi Go
• Cordys Business Operations Platform
• BizFlow Plus
• IBM Business Process Manager
• MBPM
• Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g
• webMethods BPM Suite, ARIS Enterprise,
• ARISalign
• ActiveMatrix BPM

Please visit PEGA Tutorials section for articles on PEGA and PRPC

YouTube API with .NETHow to search YouTube videos list Programmatically?

To continue our learning towards YouTube API with .NET this article will provide details how we can search for YouTube video list programmatically. In the last post we learn about pulling list of video uploaded by a specific user.

To demonstrate the example we have following interface designed in Ms-Visual Studio 2010. We have a text box where user can to enter search term. We have a button called "Search Video List" which contains the application logic to connect to YouTubeServices and pull list of videos that matches the search term. In the list view box we will show the video titles, uploader name and uploaded date.

We have added Google Data API references in our project code. The complete code snippet on this form is following. I have kept the application code simple for demonstration purpose. We are reading the YouTube feed and fetching the list of videos in viewcount order.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Google.GData.YouTube;
using Google.YouTube;
using Google.GData.Client;
using Google.GData.Extensions.MediaRss;

namespace YouTubeAPI
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        string myDeveloperKey;
            
        public Form1()
        {
            myDeveloperKey = "my Long string developer key";
        
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {

            listView1.Columns.Add("Video Title");
            listView1.Columns.Add("Uploaded By");
            listView1.Columns.Add("Uploaded Date");
            
            listView1.FullRowSelect = true;

            string youTubeSearchTerm;

            youTubeSearchTerm = textBox1.Text;
            
            YouTubeService myservice = new YouTubeService("aa",myDeveloperKey);

            Uri videoEntryUrl = new Uri("http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=" + youTubeSearchTerm + "&safeSearch=none&orderby=viewCount");
        
        
            FeedQuery fq=new FeedQuery();
            fq.Uri=videoEntryUrl;
            
            Feed<Video> videoFeed = new Feed<Video>(myservice,fq);
                        foreach (Video entry in videoFeed.Entries)
            {
                listView1.Items.Add((new ListViewItem(new string[] { entry.Title.ToString(), entry.Author.ToString(), entry.Updated.ToLongDateString() })));
            }
        }

    }
}

After setting up the design and code in Visual Studio, I connected with the internet as I am pulling the information from an online source (YouTube) and run the application.

I tried to pull the video list for search Term Lady Gaga first and results were as expected.

On second instance I search for list of videos related with Barack Obama.