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The Constellation configuration paradigm

Transitioning to Constellation involves a shift in mindset from customization to configuration.

Constellation is a whole new UI authoring experience. Constellation applications offer quicker time to value, easier upgrades, and an out-of-the-box UI with accessibility improvements built in. To take advantage of these benefits, you must embrace Constellation’s configuration paradigm. Below is a list of high-level changes that broadly represent the paradigm shift from Pega’s Traditional UI architecture to the cutting-edge Constellation architecture:

Blueprint first

Pega Blueprint™ is a software as a service tool that supports early‑stage application design using generative AI and industry best practices. By providing a structured starting point for enterprise application design, Blueprint helps teams reduce initial design effort and accelerate alignment.

Using Blueprint guides teams to define Center‑Out® journeys, Data Models, and outcome‑focused workflows that Pega Constellation™ can render automatically. Blueprint emphasizes business logic and application structure rather than screen‑level customization, and generates an application model that includes core Case structures and the Data needed to support business objectives.

Blueprint supports the rapid design of foundational application elements and encourages the use of standardized Constellation layouts, which help limit rule‑by‑rule user interface customization. Blueprint output aligns with Constellation standard components to support consistency, accessibility, and responsive design. By separating user interface layers from business logic, Blueprint helps teams focus on application behavior and outcomes during early design phases.

Note: For more information, see Creating a new application from a Blueprint.

Building applications in App Studio

Use the generated Blueprint as a starting point for development in App Studio. App Studio abstracts much of the underlying complexity related to Rulesets and classes so that developers can focus on application design rather than rule placement. When creating resources in App Studio, Pega Platform™ automatically generates the required Rules and Classes, and assigns the appropriate Ruleset and Class context.

Applications built in App Studio follow established best practices and guardrails that support a Center‑out, Channel‑agnostic approach. This approach helps promote consistency in application structure and user experience across channels, and supports maintainability for both clients and application development teams.

Customization to Configuration

With Constellation, application development emphasizes business outcomes and workflow behavior rather than detailed user interface customization.

Developers spend less time defining presentation details, such as button placement, and more time focusing on workflow logic and the data required to support efficient Case resolution. Constellation applies a prescribed design for core user interface and workflow elements, which allows application developers and clients to concentrate on customer needs across the journey.

Views instead of Sections

In a traditional Pega architecture, application developers create Sections, where each functional part of the user interface, including visible fields and controls, requires configuration. Individual Sections are assembled within a Harness, which defines the overall screen layout for the application user interface. This approach requires developers to make detailed presentation decisions and can increase effort when building or updating applications.

With Constellation, Sections are replaced by Views. Each View uses a prescribed presentation layer that defines information structure, interactions, accessibility, and data visualization, and is implemented using a React‑based front‑end framework. This approach shifts development emphasis toward defining workflow behavior and the data required to support Case resolution, rather than configuring individual user interface elements.

A stateless architecture

A stateless architecture is commonly associated with improved scalability, performance characteristics, and maintainability. Constellation adopts a stateless architecture to support this approach within Pega applications.

Moving to a stateless architecture introduces changes in application behavior and development workflows. In Constellation applications, the server does not maintain a persistent requestor session. Each request is processed independently, and the requestor session is terminated after the request completes.

As a result, traditional debugging methods that rely on an active Clipboard session are no longer available. The Clipboard is released after each Constellation DX API call, which means it cannot be accessed from the end‑user portal or by switching threads in Dev Studio to inspect live data. Instead, Constellation provides alternative debugging tools designed to support application analysis in a stateless environment.

Note: For more information about debugging applications with Constellation, see Tools for debugging Constellation.

Also, Data Page functionality and best practices have changed considerably. Because it is stateless, the Constellation architecture does not support temporary pages – you must use Data Pages instead. 

Note: For a comparison of Data Pages in Pega Traditional UI and Constellation architectures, see Data Pages in Constellation.

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