The December 2016 update for Navigator for i included a number of enhancements; one of the most significant extends the work management tasks to include IBM i subsystem creation and configuration. This support is available for all current releases.
Prior to the December 2016 update, Navigator only supported active subsystems; if you needed to manage subsystem configurations, you had to use the 5250 terminal interface. Now, you can view and modify your subsystem configurations via the graphical user interface.
When you expand Work Management in the left navigation frame, there is now a Subsystem Descriptions task.
When you initially select the Subsystem Descriptions task, Navigator will display the subsystem descriptions in your library list – this is similar to what you see when you do WRKSBSD *ALL on the green screen.
You can use the Actions → Include… dialog to specify which subsystem description(s) from which libraries you want to display. This is similar to prompting on the the WRKSBSD command to specify which subsystem description(s) to work with. Navigator will remember the selections you make and will automatically use these customizations the next time you launch the subsystem descriptions task.
Once you have found the desired subsystem description, you can right-click on the name to display the available options. You can start or stop subsystems, work with the jobs running within an active subsystem, change or delete the subsystem description, and configure the various entries associated with a subsystem by selecting Properties.
When you select Properties, a panel appears with tabs for each of the various configuration entries you can associate with a subsystem description. You don’t have to remember all the different capabilities a subsystem supports – there is one tab for each type of entry. In addition, you don’t need to know the name of the ADD… command; simply take the Actions → Add… dropdown to define the configuration entry for the subsystem.
The screen capture below shows the tabbed panel and an example of adding a prestart job entry.
Let’s consider an example … quite some time ago, I wrote a blog about routing work to subsystems by user profile (Route DB2 Requests to a Specific Subsystem) using the SET_SERVER_SBS_ROUTING IBM i service. In that article, I mentioned that you first need to create the subsystem description along with the required objects and entries, but did not go into specifics. Before the Navigator update in December, you would have had to create your subsystem (CRTSBSD), optionally create your own class (CRTCLS), create your own Job Queue (CRTJOBQ) add the job queue entry (ADDJOBQE), and finally add the prestart job entry (ADDPJE).
If you need your own class or job queue, you will still need to create those via the green screen or use the Run Command task within the System tasks to create those objects (perhaps Navigator will be enhanced to add the ability to create these objects as well…). Otherwise, everything else is there to configure and manage your subsystems from the GUI.
I encourage you to ensure you have the latest HTTP Group PTF installed for your IBM i release and explore this new capability.
This blog post was edited to fix broken links on November 2, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.