Guru: Manage Filters in RDi

March 11, 2019 Paul Tuohy

The longer you have been using Rational Developer for i (RDi), the longer the list of filters you are trying to manage. Maybe you have started to get clever with the naming of filters and/or you spend a lot of time using drag and drop to try and keep your filters in some kind of order.

The good news is that RDi does provide a means of grouping filters — Filter Pools.

This is a (very) cut down example of filters in my Remote Systems view. Let’s see how we can use Filter Pools to make this list more manageable.

Enabling Filter Pools

To enable Filter Pools, click on the down arrow in the top right hand corner of the Remote Systems view and select the option to Show Filter Pools.

This results in the layout of Remote Systems changing. The Objects section now consists of two filters: the first one (paultuohya176:com.ibm.etools.iseries.subsystems.qsys.objects) contains the standard Work with and Library options and the second one (CN-SiD-com.ibm.etools.iseries.subsystems.qsys.objects) contains the original list of filters.

When you enable filter pools, they don’t just apply to Objects — they also apply to Commands, Jobs, IFS Files and Spooled Files. A filter pool is unique to where it is created — creating a new filter group in Objects does not create a corresponding filter group in Commands.

Creating And Populating A Filter Pool

To create a new filter pool, right click on the category (Objects, Commands, Jobs, IFS Files, Spooled Files) and select New->Filter Pool from the context menu. In the resulting window, provide the required filter pool name and click on Finish.

I have created a few filter pools (Articles, SiD, Courses, Customer x, Customer y, RPGLEDOC, Skunk) and I am ready to start moving my existing filters using drag and drop.

And we finally end up with groups of organized filters.

Adding To A Filter Pool

To add a filter to an existing filter pool, right click on the filter pool name and select New. Then select the required filter type and continue with the normal definition of a filter.

If you use the standard Work with options to define a filter, then the filter will be defined in the main filter group (as with TESTSTUFF/* in the following image) and you will need to drag and drop it to the required filter pool — or leave it where it is, if that is what you want.

Managing The List Of Filter Pools

You can remove a filter pool from the list and include it back in again at a later stage. To remove a filter pool from the list, right click on the filter pool name and select Remove Reference from the context menu.

To return the filter pool to the list, right click on the category (Objects, Commands, Jobs, IFS Files, Spooled Files) and select New->Filter Pool Reference->Parent Profile and select the required filter pool from the list.

If you didn’t already know about filter pools, I hope this tip helps to make RDi even more useful to you.

Paul Tuohy, IBM Champion and author of Re-engineering RPG Legacy Applications, is a prominent consultant and trainer for application modernization and development technologies on the IBM Midrange. He is currently CEO of ComCon, a consultancy firm in Dublin, Ireland, and partner at System i Developer. He hosts the RPG & DB2 Summit twice per year with partners Susan Gantner and Jon Paris.