The components of Constellation

The Constellation design system is a shared library of pre-built UI patterns comprised of reusable components that work together to create feature-rich UIs and productive user experiences. Patterns are pre-configured combinations of components that are proven to drive user productivity. This library of pre-built components enables low-code developers to quickly build powerful custom applications with out-of-the-box tools.

The Constellation design system is built on React, an open-source front-end JavaScript library for building component-based UIs. Constellation applications are Single Page Applications (SPAs). Rather than loading entirely new HTML pages to display even one piece of new data, SPAs load a single HTML page and dynamically rewrite the current page with new data from the server. React batches UI changes to minimize the number of re-renders. All of this results in less lag, better performance, and a smoother user experience.

With Pega’s Traditional UI architecture you build UIs by customizing Sections of your application from scratch, dragging and dropping various controls, such as text fields, buttons, and dynamic layouts. The Traditional UI architecture allowed clients to fully customize their applications. This approach provided tremendous flexibility,  but it came at the cost of all customized solutions - longer development time, increased maintenance costs, and more brittle solutions.

Constellation architecture represents a shift from customization to configuration. With Constellation, you configure your application’s Data Model, which generates a largely prescriptive overall experience. From the Data Model, Constellation generates the end-to-end experience, including the UI and actions. This means shorter development time, a more consistent user experience across Channels, easier upgrades, and minimal maintenance.

Constellation offers pre-configured UI templates, as well as prescribed navigation, workflows, and information architecture, all of which enable our clients to take advantage of our 40 years of experience in building enterprise applications and more easily build consistent, error-proof applications in record time.

The Constellation DX API is a set of model-driven API endpoints that enable developers to view, create, and update Pega Cases and Assignments. Where the Traditional DX API was used to support non-native UIs, the Constellation DX API supports both Pega native UIs and non-native UIs. To say that another way, the same API endpoints power Pega software's out-of-the-box user experiences and its custom front-end experiences. You can build consistent user experiences for Pega applications without encoding business logic into each Channel.

The Constellation DX API isn’t just an upgrade, it is an entirely re-engineered experience. The Constellation DX API has drastically reduced networked traffic with 30% fewer requests on first load and a seven-times smaller network payload. The DX API responses are much more robust, containing all the necessary information to reproduce Views in any front-end framework, including layouts, fields, validation, conditional visibility, and actions. The Constellation DX API also includes new API endpoints, enabling additional functionality through API calls, such as following a Case or moving a Case to a new Stage.