Configure Pega 7 HTTP Proxy for REST Service Calls

For HTTP calls to e.g. REST services, a Pega 7 HTTP proxy may have to be configured. This is the case when the Pega 7 Exercise System from Pega Academy –using VMWare Player or Oracle VM VirtualBox– is installed on a machine within a network that requires a network proxy for Internet connections.

• Here, the Pega 7 Exercise System is installed as per Installing Pega 7 on Mac OS with Oracle VirtualBox.

The screen shot below shows the Pega 7 Designer Studio home page. On page load, Pega 7 will attempt to connect via a REST service to the PDN to get the news. When Pega 7 is running behind a network proxy, this call fails and the error Unable to connect to the PDN at this time. is shown.

• The Pega logs show a java.net.UnknownHostException because the target host is unknown:

2017-09-20 18:08:56,601 [http-nio-8080-exec-7] [  STANDARD] [          ] [    MyStore:01.01.01] 
(nvoke.Rule_Connect_REST.Action) ERROR  admin@pgx.com 
- com.pega.pegarules.pub.services.ConnectorException: 
Caught unhandled exception: java.net.UnknownHostException: pdn.pega.com: unknown error

• This post shows 2 options for configuring a Pega 7 HTTP proxy.

1. The Pega 7 pyInvokeRESTConnector Activity for REST Service Calls
2. Option A: Set System Properties for Pega 7 HTTP Proxy in Tomcat
3. Option B: Set System Properties for Pega 7 HTTP Proxy in Java Activity Step

• Install Pega 7 Exercise System on Tomcat 9 and PostgreSQL
• Call REST Service in Pega 7 with Connect REST Rule
• Call SOAP Service in Pega 7 with Connect SOAP Rule

• The PDN News feed section relies on a data page called D_PDNFeed, which uses a Connect REST rule called pyRSSConnectService as its data source.

• For Connect REST rule executions, Pega 7 uses the activity pyInvokeRESTConnector to facilitate the HTTP GET or POST call. This activity contains Java steps that use the Apache HttpPClient API.
• In step 4 of the activity, there is logic to check for HTTP proxy system properties.

• In order for this activity to use a HTTP proxy, these system properties need to be set:

• System properties can be added to Tomcat using the catalina.properties file.
• This file is located in the <tomcat-root>/conf folder.
• On the Pega 7.1.9 Exercise System, running on a virtual machine, the file is located at:

/opt/tomcat/conf

• On the Pega 7.1.6 Exercise System, running on a virtual machine, the file is located at:

/usr/share/tomcat7

• Open the catalina.properties file and add the following system properties:

• The catalina.properties file should look like this example (here, username and password are set too):

• Note that the backslash character in the username is encoded using \u0005c as per the Unicode standard. For details on this see Java properties backslash discussion on stackoverflow.
• Restart Tomcat or if you are running the Pega 7 Exercise System, restart the virtual machine.
• The PDN news feed on the Designer Studio home page should now load successfully as shown below.

• If an activity is used to call the Connect REST rule, a Java step in the activity can be used to set the system properties before the call to the REST service.

System.setProperty("http.proxyHost", "proxy.abc.com");
System.setProperty("http.proxyPort", "8080");
System.setProperty("http.proxyUser", "users\\ssmith");
System.setProperty("http.proxyPassword", "password12345");

• In the below example, the same Connect REST rule is executed in a custom activity using the Connect-REST method. A Java step is used to set the HTTP proxy system properties.

• When the activity is executed, the REST call succeeds and the service page contains the GET response data: