Managing connections with File Manager® Plug-in

Establishing a connection to a File Manager® Server

The steps below detail how to establish a connection to a File Manager® server. If any errors are encountered, refer to the Connection Problem Diagnostics section for potential solutions.

  1. Show the Systems Information view if it isn't already visible
  2. Click Add System  at the top of the Systems Information view. This will show the a dialog for adding a Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS connection.
  3. Follow the instructions in the help of the Application Delivery Foundation Common Components for more information about managing connections.

A connection can also be established by using the Host Connections view.

  1. Show the Host Connections view by clicking Window -> Show View -> Other -> expand the Host Connections folder -> select Host Connections -> OK.
  2. Click the Add button next to the Connections section.
  3. Follow the instructions in the help of Application Delivery Foundation Common Components for more information about managing connections.

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Disconnecting from a File Manager® Server

The File Manager® plug-in operates by making one or more connections to each system in the Systems Information view on an as-needed basis. Each connection starts a new session under the user id specified when a password is provided, and, because it takes some time to establish a connection, connections are by default kept open indefinitely (or until an unrecoverable error occurs, in which case the offending connection is closed).

To manually close all active connection(s) to a system, right click on the system then click Close Connections from the pop-up menu. This will close all open connections and end the corresponding user sessions on the host. Any results of queries will still be visible, and, if you try to perform any operation which requires a connection (e.g. refreshing a query to get updated results), the plug-in will automatically create a new connection as usual.

To remove a system completely, right click on the system and click Remove from the pop-up menu. All connections to the system will be closed before the system is removed.

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Disconnecting from Host Connections View when any Editor Session is open

When any of Editor session is open and the connection is closed from the host connections view, the active open editors get closed to avoid any errors due to session disconnect.

If any of the editors are in a dirty state and the disconnection is done, there will be a dialog prompt that presents three choices:

  1. YES: to save the changes and then close the editor.
  2. NO: to close the editor without saving the changes.
  3. Cancel: to do nothing and revert the disconnect action.

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Handling a connection error due to wrong password

In case a wrong password is entered and the save option is not ticked while logging, the user needs to refresh either the connection node or the selected node (ie. DB2, CICS, Data Sets, etc)

The refresh is required to prompt back a login dialog and enter the correct password

The refresh is also advisable to bring back items in the tree even if the save password option is ticked. In this case the refresh should be done after entering cthe orrect password in the login dialog.

Changing Mainframe Profile Password

Previously, changing profile password was only possible through the host side 3270 interface. Now its possible to change it from the client side as well. To do it we need to right click on the connection from Systems Information View and click on "Change Password" Menu option. This will further prompt a dialog which will ask to enter the new password.

Open Connection Menu

Change password dialog

After clicking OK button there will be a message dialog saying password is successfully changed

Password Changed dialog

The user can now login again with the newly changed password after disconnection.

Similarly a dialog is prompted at the time of login in case the user password expires. Follow the same process as explained above to change the password using below dialog.

Password expiry dialog

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