MO71 is our graphical administration tool for IBM MQ. You can manage all the different object types in MQ using its lists and object dialogs. The lists are fully flexible allowing you to determine which fields are interesting to you and which are not and choosing only to display those columns in the list as a result.
You can make these changes temporarily, just to the instance of the dialog you are currently using. You can make them more permanently, so that every time you bring up that list on that queue manager, you have the same columns. Or finally, you can make these changes across all your queue managers, because the columns you want are the ones you think should be the default set. You can also change the columns in a dynamic manner using filters.
This post will cover these various different mechanisms.
Temporarily alter the list shown
When looking at a list of objects you can change the columns that are displayed by selecting the Options -> Alter List… item from the context menu.
This will bring up a dialog where you can locate the additional columns you want to display. So I’ve got a list of queues, with some cluster queues and I want to see the Cluster Queue Manager that hosts the cluster queues, so I locate the field Cluster Queue Manager Name (CLUSQMGR) in the right hand side of the window in the list of “Remaining Fields”, and move it to the “List Contents” by pressing the << button. Then I can move its position in the columns on the left hand side using the up and down buttons, and press OK to complete the change.
Now you’ll see that your queue list has the additional column you selected. However, if you close the queue list dialog, and later open another queue list dialog, you’ll see that your alteration to the list of fields shown has been forgotten, it was a temporary change that you made.
Permanently alter the list for one queue manager
Following exactly the same process as above, with one small change, you can make the change permanent for that queue manager. On the dialog which allows you to change the columns shown, instead of just pressing OK to make the change, first press Apply All which applies the change to all instances of that particular list dialog for this queue manager, both those currently open, and any future invocations of that list dialog. This change is also remembered across a restart of the MO71 program.
Permanently alter the list for all queue managers
In essence, this mechanism is changing the defaults for list dialogs. If you add a new queue manager to MO71, it will pick up the default columns too.
Using the menu option View -> Set Default Lists -> Queue List… (or whichever list dialog you want to change), you will be presented with a very similar dialog to the one above, except instead of referring to a single queue manager in the window title, it will indicate that it is a “global” list.
Pressing OK or Apply on the global change list dialog will set the new default and all queue managers that have not had their list changed by the above mechanisms will pick up these new defaults. Pressing Apply All on this dialog will set all queue managers to use this list instead of anything that may have previously been altered by the above mechanisms. Because this is a ‘destructive’ setting (i.e. you lose previous set up you might have done), there is a confirmation dialog for this change. This change is also remembered across a restart of the MO71 program.
Changing columns in a filter
You can also change the column display from within a filter. This can particularly useful when creating pre-defined dialogs. Especially if you want to have several different ‘default’ sets of columns.
This can be done in two ways. Firstly by adding a ‘#’ character after a keyword or user variable name, to show it as a column on the end of the display. The example below has a filter which creates a user variable called “Fullness” and as a result of the ‘#’ character on the end, also displays that as a column.
The other way to manipulate columns from within a filter is to use the showcol and hidecol functions. This is very useful in a pre-defined dialog, allowing you to change the default set of columns to exactly what you need for this dialog. You might, for example, have several different queue lists, one for cluster queues, one for transmission queues, and one for dead-letter queues across all your queue managers. You can imagine wanting slightly different columns on display for each one.
The showcol function takes the MQSC spelling of the keyword and the column position, and the hidecol function just takes the keyword.
Hopefully now you can have exactly the columns you want on display in any list you are viewing. If you have any questions please leave a comment below, or get in touch.
If you don’t have a licence and would like to try out MO71 then send an email to support@mqgem.com and a 1-month trial licence will be sent to you.
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