iCan Blog Archive

You should already be familiar with the fact that you can launch Navigator for i from Access Client Solutions (ACS). But did you know that there are now functions, that when requested from Navigator for i, are executed with ACS?  

With the latest enhancements to ACS, things such as Run SQL Scripts, Show Statements, and Visual Explain have been added to ACS. You can also access these functions from Navigator and have them executed by ACS.

To enable this integration, you need to start ACS and have it set up to handle Navigator requests. The steps are simple:

1. If you have not yet created a system configuration for your system, do so by clicking the ‘System Configurations’ link from the main interface, then clicking the ‘Add’ button.

2.  Select ‘Navigator Requests’ from the ‘Tools’ menu. Select your system from the list and click ‘Start’.  Sign on if necessary.

When your system is listening for Navigator requests, you will see the status as “Listening for requests” as the following screen capture shows: (image not available).

You are now set up to allow tasks requested from Navigator to run with ACS.

Let’s look at a couple simple examples.

In Navigator, if I simply open Databases, I see the database for my system. From there, Navigator gives you the option to Run SQL Scripts…

If you had not set up ACS to listen for Navigator requests, you would get the following: (image not available).

With ACS listening for Navigator requests, the Run SQL Scripts task in ACS would be launched instead.

Another simple example is to start from the Index Advisor task in Navigator, then take the option to Show SQL or Show Statements…

Without listening for Navigator requests, the results are displayed in the Navigator tab.

But if you have ACS listening for Navigator requests, the same results are shown in a Run SQL Scripts task.

Another example of Navigator launching to ACS is with Authority collection (7.3 only). You can display an authority collection using the client viewer.

Similar to the example above, if you do not have ACS listening for Navigator requests, you will get a panel that explains how to enable the client viewer. But once you have ACS listening for client requests, the results will be displayed with ACS via Run SQL Scripts.

This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.