What DX Components Are You Missing in Constellation?

User Experience
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1

Hi Everyone,

Following the great feedback and success of the post on collapsible repeating views, I wanted to start a new conversation to gather your input on another important topic: custom DX Components.

For those who may not be familiar, custom DX Components are a powerful way to extend the Constellation UI with your own reusable components. You can find more details on what they are and how to build them in the official documentation and our webinars on the topic.

We’ve also seen some great open-source examples in the Constellation UI Gallery, which shows what’s possible.

Now, I’d like to hear from you, the User Experience Expert Circle. To help us identify what to build next, I’m hoping you can share your thoughts on the following:

  • What components are you repeatedly building for your projects?

  • Are there any common use cases that you find difficult to solve with the current out-of-the-box components?

  • What new components would make your development process faster and more efficient?

Please share your ideas, use cases, and any challenges you’re facing. The more detail, the better!

I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback and working together to make the Pega platform even better.

Thanks,
Marc

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Hello @MarcCheong

Appreciate the initiative you taken to compile this post. This kind of feedback will be really helpful to Pega to understand the pulse of the developer community and make the platform better. I actually have a list ready already which i was drafting whenever i have a feedback.

From my experience working with Pega Constellation, there are a few areas where additional OOTB components or enhancements would significantly reduce the need for custom DX components:

1. Flexible Layout Variants
Current layout templates feel limited, especially when handling mixed control types. This often results in uneven field alignment in forms. Having more configurable and responsive layout variants would help avoid building custom templates for common UI patterns.

2. Toggle Control for Boolean Fields
Alongside the standard checkbox, an OOTB toggle/switch component would improve usability and visual appeal, especially for modern UI expectations.

3. Unified Multimedia Component
A single, configurable control to render multimedia content (Image, QR Code, Barcode, Video, etc.) irrespective of whether the source is a property or a data page would act as a one-stop solution and reduce repeated customization.

4. Configurable Action Control in Tables
For table/grid use cases, a generic action control would be valuable—supporting rendering as a link, button, or icon, with flexible behaviors such as:

  • Opening external URLs
  • Triggering local actions (modal)
  • Launching preview drawers
  • Navigating to full-page views

5. PDF Viewer Control
An OOTB PDF viewer component with options to open content in a modal, preview drawer, or new tab would simplify document viewing use cases without custom integrations.

6. Form Reset / Clear Action
A configurable “Clear/Reset” action at the form level would be useful to quickly clear user inputs. This could optionally be conditionally displayed (via when rules), similar to how “clear selection” works for certain controls.

7. Rich Text Editor (Advanced OOTB)
The current capabilities are quite basic. An enhanced OOTB rich text editor with support for formatting, tables, image embedding, and controlled HTML sanitization would reduce dependency on custom integrations.

8. File Handling & Preview Enhancements
Beyond simple attachments, developers often need:

  • Ability to annotate or tag documents. This is especially critical for document-heavy workflows.

9. Better Section-Level Refresh / Partial UI Updates
Constellation abstracts a lot, but developers still need finer control over partial refreshes (similar to section refresh in UI-Kit). Current options sometimes force full view reloads, impacting UX and performance.

10. Theming & Styling Flexibility
Even though Constellation promotes standardization, there is still a need for:

  • More granular theming control (spacing, alignment, typography)
  • Ability to tweak styles without fully going into custom React components
  • Table column and row stylings, etc
  • Styling for repeating views header.

Nice to Have

  • Hierarchical Multi-Select Dropdown: For complex datasets, a tree-structured multi-select dropdown would greatly enhance usability compared to flat lists.
  • Skeleton loaders / better loading states for async data
  • Wizard/stepper component with built-in validations and progress tracking

I will leave the room for others to add their opinion.

Regards

JC

3

Thanks for your detailed response :clap: :glowing_star: and your companion to this, extending existing components (Suggestions for Enhancing Flexibility in Pega Constellation (Based on Hands-on Experience))

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1. Attachment preview in case

Provide in‑case preview for emails and all common attachments (PDF, Word, Excel, XML, etc.) so users don’t need to download and open externally (currently three clicks).

2. Rich text editor toolbar

Enhance the Pega rich text editor with more options: font type/size, font color, background highlight (“paintbrush”), and formatting tools. Configured via the Rich Text Editor control’s Presentation and Edit Options.

3. Email draft from case

Add an email draft screen inside the case where users can compose an email with toolbar and select existing case attachments (emails, documents, etc.) to send directly from the case.

4. Icons in grids

Add icons in list views/grids (e.g., attachment paperclip, email envelope, RGB colour indicate in case of priority

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Hi We are going ahead with coexistence using PPF so users need to access UI Kit cases linked to constellation cases or vice versa. Not from unified worklist but from the case review harness so that the case can be opened in a single click. Not sure if it comes under custom components or not but this may help a lot of other customers who are modernizing with a coexistence and incremental migration approach.

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Hi Marc,

Some components I am missing on my projects:

  • Image control. The current control is very basic. I would like to be able to use Binary files directly.
  • List control. A better Constellation approach to create lists (without using tables), with the option to add & remove list items, do search & select and have a list-to-list option.
  • An improved autocomplete/combobox control. The current component is very limited.
  • Improved Badge control. Using the status values on the badge component is a bit cumbersome. This can be improved
  • Icon library component and integration in buttons, links, headers, text
  • Notification component for informational, error, warnings and success messages. It is good UX to show a success message when users successfully complete an action. The component should allow HTML so formatted text and links can be used inside the notifications.
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Thanks for your inputs, valuable as always :clap:

Could you provide more detail on “An improved autocomplete/combobox control. The current component is very limited”. What are you looking for? I have my own thoughts but don’t want to bias your response.

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Hello @MarcCheong

Having below components would be helpful for all

1 - Publish Notifications Component

Similar to the functionality available in traditional applications, where only the required section can be refreshed for selected users, having the same capability in Constellation would be highly beneficial. Currently, this functionality is not available in Constellation. If a reusable component is introduced for this purpose, it would help in many business scenarios requiring real-time UI updates.

2 - Notification Preference Component

Currently, users in Constellation applications do not have the ability to control their notification preferences, similar to what is available in traditional applications. Providing a component where users can choose how they want to receive notifications (email, in-app, etc.) would greatly improve user experience and flexibility.

3 - Customizable Case Search Option

The current case search functionality available in the Constellation portal is limited in terms of customization. For example, it is not possible to customize suggestion values shown based on keywords entered by users. If there is a way to configure or customize search suggestions dynamically, it would significantly enhance usability and search efficiency.

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Thanks for sharing. Notifications is a theme in this thread - I’ve also seen Global Search configuration come up a few times. This helps :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi @MarcCheong
Having these component would be helpful

1. Input Auto-Formatting / Masking Capability
One common requirement is the ability to automatically format user input. For example, when a user enters 12345, it should be displayed as 123-45. Currently, this is not supported in Pega Constellation as real-time input masking or dynamic formatting is not available at the UI level. Introducing this capability would significantly enhance user experience, ensure consistent data entry, and reduce the need for backend-based transformations.

2. Reusable Related Case Explorer Component
Introduce a reusable Related Case Explorer component to effectively visualize and navigate case relationships.

  • Displaying linked cases (parent, child, or dependent cases) in a structured format such as tree, list, or grouped view

  • Providing clickable navigation to directly open related cases

  • Offering configuration options to define relationship types and control display hierarchy

This capability would greatly improve case traceability, user navigation efficiency, and dependency management, particularly in applications with complex case interactions.
Thanks!

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Thanks! The second one, I agree. @schos1 and I have had many engagements where we’ve had to create our own “related cases” approach. This would be great if it was automated and with a nice OOTB widget (or extension to the '25 Case Hierarchy one)

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A great ask Constellation RTE — Add Insert Property Toolbar Option to Support Dynamic Property References in Letter Templates from @SumeethV

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A few things I have run into:

  1. Static images / videos / URLs / text - where you can actually assign the value in App Studio directly rather than having to do it programatically. There are many scenarios where you need to author content for display, not just for data collection (example: troubleshooting instructions). Not being able to assign the value at design time is annoying.
  2. Embedded videos. Yes you can stick a link to a video. But it’s often better to embed the video and display it inline.
  3. Masked display. Let’s say you have a credit card number. You only want to display the last 4 digits on the screen and mask the rest. Or a password, which is fully masked. (Note: There is a different control in the UI Gallery for masked input - like requiring a phone number to be 10 numeric digits. But that is upon data entry. I’m talking a different thing which is formatting the data display).
  4. Better UI control width options. All the controls seem to fill up the width 100%. Why restrict it just to that? Sometimes left justified and just taking up X pixels is better. So I would put make some components that just give you more justification/width control options.
  5. Boolean field as a radio button. Think I saw a thread on this.
  6. Blinking red header text! Just kidding :slight_smile:

Great thread, thanks all!!

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  1. :laughing: (got me for a second)

Thanks for taking the time to contribute!

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Hello. You made some great points.

We use this technique to hide information, which is point 3 on your list.

For point 4, we help users understand what they should enter by making text inputs the appropiately size for the content they’re intended for.

Thanks,
Alex