Users and Groups in New Nav – User Profiles

I’ve focused on using Run SQL Scripts, so let’s switch and explore how to use New Nav to manage user and group profiles.

Launch New Nav, choose the partition to manage (called a “node” in New Nav), and then go down to the icon that looks like a group of people, as shown in Figure 5.3.

Figure 5.3: Move your cursor down to the “people” icon to access the Users and Groups section of New Nav.

The Create User and Create Group options are the same as they were in Heritage Nav. Create User is a graphical version of CRTUSRPRF together with the Add Directory Entry (ADDDIRE) command. Create Group is interesting, however, because it will create the user profile and then assign it as a group profile to the users you specify. In other words, in just one step, it creates the user profile and then makes it a group profile by assigning the members. If you want to create a new group in the green-screen interface, you have to run CRTUSRPRF to create the group (there’s no separate command for creating a group profile) and then run CHGUSRPRF for each member and assign the newly created profile to each member’s group list.

While creating a new group and assigning the members is much more efficient in New Nav, what I really want to draw your attention to are the Users and Groups categories. If you select the Users category, the result will be a listing of all profiles on the system (excluding group profiles). An initial set of profile attributes is displayed, but if you wish to see others, simply click on the three vertical dots (as shown in the upper right corner of Figure 5.4 below) to add or remove attributes to your view. Using the filters at the top of each column, you can investigate one specific profile or all profiles with *ALLOBJ or members of a specific group. For example, in Figure 5.4, all profiles beginning with CWOOD are listed. Under the covers, New Nav is using the QSYS2.USER_INFO IBM i Service to get the information. To see the SQL that’s been generated, click on SQL in the upper right of the display. (Again, see Figure 5.4.)

Likewise, if you choose the Groups category, you’ll see a list of the group profiles on the system. These two categories are very handy if you don’t feel confident using SQL, want to see how the SQL is generated for a particular selection, or are already in New Nav and need to do some sort of user or group profile investigation and don’t want to bother launching Run SQL Scripts.

Finally, you can highlight one or more profiles and click the Actions button. You have several actions to choose from, including listing the objects owned as well as exporting the information to a spreadsheet. Note that the attributes of each profile that will be exported are in the columns in your current view. So if you want all of the attributes of the profile, you’ll need to add them to your view (using the three vertical dots) prior to exporting to a spreadsheet.

Figure 5.4: Filter the users by name or any other field. Click on the three vertical dots to add/remove attributes. Click on SQL to see the SQL generated by your selection.