Search and favorites are two of the new features added to Navigator in IBM i 7.2. You will find the search feature in the upper portion of the left-frame navigation area. The Favorites section is not far away – an expandable list near the top of the left-frame navigation area.
Navigator has a lot of new functionality with the 7.2 release (many of these new features eventually found their way back to the 7.1 release), but finding the task you want may be difficult if you are not sure where it’s located in the navigation tree. In addition, I know many of you are very comfortable with your green-screen interfaces and may not know the equivalent function in the GUI. The search feature helps with both of these scenarios.
For example, you many know that IBM provided support for PTF tasks in Navigator with the 7.2 release, but you don’t know where to find those tasks. If you type in PTF in the search box, you will be shown the PTF tasks:
If you know exactly where to navigate in Navigator, you’d find these PTF tasks under Configuration and Service:
You may also know your green-screen command, but don’t know the equivalent task in Navigator. You can type the command name in the search box and the results will provide a link to the GUI task. Let’s say you’re used to using Work with Active Jobs (WRKACTJOB) – simply type in the command and the search results will come up. Clicking on the results will take you directly to the task.
Now let’s assume you want to find all tasks associated with something – for example, all the job tasks; if you type in job in the search box, you will get a list of the job tasks, but in the case of jobs, the list is long and you will find a “more….” link at the bottom of the list. If you click on that “more…” link, a new tab will open in the Navigator browser with the complete list of tasks. In the case of “job” tasks, there are a lot of them. This approach can be useful if you want to quickly find out all the tasks you can do for that something you are interested in.
As with any search feature, you may need to play around with the search string to get the results you’re looking for.
After you have found the task(s) you have been searching for, Favorites can help you easily find them again. In next week’s blog, I’ll write more about favorites.
This blog post was edited for currency on April 11, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.