The past few days have been very full of announcements for IBM i system builders, in fact a new major release of the operating system was announced (strange since we are talking about an operating system that some people call dead :-D) namely IBM i V7R6M0. As enthusiastic as I am about it, I will wait to do an ad hoc article as soon as I have had the opportunity to test first-hand all the new features presented.
In addition to version 7.6 last week the new Technology Refresh 6 was announced for version 7.5, again I am eager to see what new features they have thought of. A first alarm bell on the other hand must start ringing for all those who have systems with the 7.4 release, this is because it was announced that no new features will be released and this somewhat foreshadows the announcement of the end of support for that release, although you need not worry, from the date of the announcement you have one year to upgrade to 7.5 or 7.6.
In today’s article, however, we are talking about ACS, the tool that we all use on a daily basis to connect in greenscreen mode to systems. in fact, version 1.1.9.8 has been released which contains new and interesting features:
- MFA support: this feature affects 7.6 systems, in fact it allows to use the client to manage MFA of the accounts on which it has been configured
- binary object preview: thanks to this new feature it will be possible directly from RUN SQL SCRIPT to preview binary objects saved in our tables like BLOB, BINARY and VARBINARY without using external products. To do this just launch the query that includes the field of interest and right click on the field and select VIEW COLUMN DATA
- formatting numeric values: how convenient is it to have numeric separators available especially when we are working with numbers with very large values? Here, with the new version of ACS it will be possible to go and insert separators of on the numeric columns in such a way as to simplify their reading
- new IFS duplicate feature: from IFS the ability to duplicate IFS files has been added, to do this, right click on the object to duplicate and choose DUPLICATE. This is one of the features that I will use most IFS manager of the ACS. Another feature that I really like is the one related to the transfer of objects from one partition to another, it is very convenient, especially when you have files to transfer to several partitions
Updating the client is very simple, either you download it from the IBM site, or you install a PTF (depends on the release, you can find the documentation at the bottom of the article) and set ACS to search for the new version directly from that system, this is very convenient when you have several client installations on users’ PCs.
Here the link to ACS documentation.
Andrea