Adding navigation to your e3270ui panels

A major advantage of the new e3270ui is ease of use and flexibility of navigation.  The e3270ui is, in essence, a 3270 based portal for performance management information.  It can be very easy to navigate from place to place once logged on to the e3270ui. 

What's also compelling is that you can easily incorporate this navigation into your panels with some very minimal changes.  So you don't like how you have to drill down through a series of popups or panels to get to a certain level of detail?  No problem.  Just add zoom column support where you need it and you are done.  The ZOOMCOLS function is nice because it's easy to add to an existing panel and can be just a one line change to add what you need.

Let's look at an example of ZOOMCOLS and how it functions.  Below we see the default KIPHLTI OMEGAMON IMS System Health panel.  This is a nice little overview panel that shows some key IMS status metrics such as queueing, CPU usage, paging, etc. 

From here it would be nice to add zoom support so that you can zoom in directly for more detail without having to navigate through multiple popups and panels.  Instead you could just position your cursor on the number of interest and press enter.

Here's how you can add the ZOOMCOLS parm to the panel code to add the navigation.

In the above example I've made a copy of the KIPHLTI panel member and edited it in hilev.UKANWENU.  If you look for the DISPLAYCOLS statement, that statement lists what information appears on the panel.  After all the DISPLAYCOLS are listed, you can add the ZOOMCOLS parameter.  In the ZOOMCOLS parameter you list the column name, and then specify the zoom destination panel.  Note in the example, you can have different zoom destination panels for different columns.

Now you get navigation such as below, simply by adding the one ZOOMCOLS parameter to the panel.  Note how when ZOOMCOLS is added the numbers in the column appear as white versus light blue.  You position the cursor on the number and press enter to zoom.