Last week, I wrote about the search feature that has been added to Navigator and mentioned another new feature—favorites. With all the capability now in Navigator, searching can be helpful to find tasks when you don’t know where they’re located in the navigation. Once you’ve found the task, you may want to start building your set of favorite tasks to make them easy to access. You do this by saving your tasks as Favorites.
There are two different ways that tasks can be saved as favorites; which you will see depends upon the type of task you are using.
- Actions drop-down menu
For tasks that present information in tables, you’ll find the Save as Favorite option in the actions drop-down menu.
- Save as favorite button
There are many tasks that present information in ways other than tables. On a few of these (System Status, Investigate Data), you’ll find a button for saving the task as a favorite.
Note that the “save as favorite” button may not appear on every panel you might expect. In fact, the IBM i development team is looking for feedback. My colleagues want to know what commonly used tasks involving information not presented in table form should have the “save as favorite” button. We look forward to hearing from our users.
Commonly accessed tasks are good candidates for favorites; saving them as favorites can make accessing those tasks just a few clicks away.
Favorites are useful for those tasks that are accessed by lengthy navigation. For example, one of my favorite perspectives in the Performance Data Investigator is Disk I/O Rates Overview – Detailed. (I wrote about this in the Measure Disk Response Times blog). To navigate to this chart, you need to follow Performance → Investigate Data → Collection Services → Disk → Disk Response Time → Detailed → Disk I/O Rates Overview – Detailed. That’s a pretty deep navigation path. With the navigation in 7.2, you can drill down to Disk I/O Rates Overview – Detailed in the left-frame, and when that task opens in the right frame, you will find the “Save as Favorite” button. Once you’ve saved this as a favorite, you can simply go to your favorites and quickly navigate to the saved chart. When you open that link, the Investigate Data task is launched and you’re taken directly to the interface to select the desired collection you want to use when you display that chart.
When you save a task as a favorite, you give it a name of your choice (it’s probably a good idea to name it the same or very similar to the actual task name so you know exactly what it is!) as well as a category.
The category is your way of organizing your favorites. You can specify new categories when saving the favorite; you can also edit your favorites to change their organization and modify the categories you’ve created.
You manage your favorites by clicking on the Favorites task in the navigation frame. This will bring up the Favorites task where you can remove tasks, change the order of tasks in the lists, and edit them, which allows you to change the name you used for the favorite as well as the category selected. Favorites are saved by system and user profile; if you have several IBM i partitions you manage with Navigator, you’ll need to establish your favorites for each partition.
After working with your favorites, you may need to refresh the favorites to see your modifications. In the navigation frame, there’s a small icon that will show up when you put your cursor over the “Favorites” link—this icon is the reload icon. You can click on this icon to refresh your favorites folder. (You’ll find the reload icon in various other places in the navigation frame as well).
This blog post was edited to fix broken links on April 11, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.