Informing the IBM Community

The new new in the New Navigator for i

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The New Navigator for i has the potential to change the way people work with IBM i. If you are a developer or a system administrator, it does not matter here. Up to now we have all been using 5250 emulation, some of us on a daily basis. This New Navigator for i brings DB2 for i Services and a browser GUI together. When you have the opportunity to use it yourself, you will be surprised how good it performs, even on a small LPAR. The good news is that you do not need to run the New Navigator for i on every LPAR you manage, you just have to connect to another LPAR from the installed LPAR.

Add to Favorites List

To access the favorites you saved, you have to press the Star next to the Search field in the top of your screen. Below an image of where to find it:

View SQL

When pressing the SQL button a screen will pop up like the one shown below:

As you can see, running the SQL statement in ACS Run SQL scripts is only one extra mouse click away. Next to the text View SQL is the “Node Hostname”, which can be set when editing the “Node Information”. Which in his turn can be found using the by pressing this icon. Pressing that icon will change the view from Table into Tile view.

Refresh

I assume this does need an explanation, but my guess is that the rate of the refresh is something you have not experienced in the current Navigator for i.

New

For the rest of this article, I would like to focus on what is new compared with the current Navigator for i, when working with Work Management. Something which is brand new for this New Navigator for i.

These are the options:

  1. Active Prestart Jobs
  2. Active JVM Jobs

Active Prestart Jobs

As Prestart jobs are being used by this GUI too, it is worth mentioning that IBM has written an Experience Report dealing with tuning Prestart Jobs: Tuning prestart job entries.

Depending on your setup, SSL is used or not, so check the prestart jobs QZDASOINIT or QZADASSINIT. Again, this is something you determine when editing the Node Information.

Those are not the only Prestart Jobs used, the QZRCSRVS is also used. So, if you not happy with the performance of the New Navigator for i, you can start with reading this manual. When you are done, please do not look surprised if the jobs using ODBC also run better. Waiting is nobody’s hobby.

In case you wonder what the arrow in the image is pointing at. This arrow is pointing to the icon which will allow you to change the columns shown and their order. Please remember that this setting is saved and at the user level.

Active JVM Jobs

When comparing this screen with the default, you will notice that I have changed the order and want to see how much of the maximum heap size is used, in order to avoid the Out of Memory error in Java. Here you can also see the part Java has in your temporary storage usage. Those familiar with running Java applications on IBM i know that you need to stay away from the limit set by the maximum heap size.  If Java does run out of memory, you should know that if the user has no home directory, IBM i will put the files generated, because of this, in the Root.

Again, using the SQL icon will allow you to see the SQL statement behind this. It does not need much adjusting to do the math and keep an eye on the available free Heap size. You might even turn it into a percentage by modifying it some more. And the icing on the cake would be to run this in a procedure, sending a mail if the percentage free Heap size is below 10 %. If you are interested in seeing this in action, please let me know. That is something completely different from the New Navigator for i.

For me the task is simple, the next time I need to look something up, I will first check if it is available in this GUI. We humans are persons of habits, but once we see something making life easier, we adopt instantly. So, speaking for myself, I think the future the New Navigator will make me move away from using 5250 emulation. My bet is that once you get hold of it, it will do the same for you.

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Comments

One response to “The new new in the New Navigator for i”

  1. Liliane Van Winckel avatar
    Liliane Van Winckel

    Looks promising !

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