Little Things Mean a Lot in RDi 9.6

IBM i development experts Jon Paris and Susan Gantner review new enhancements to RDi

We have written about some of the big enhancements to RDi that have come during the 9.6 release of RDi, such as hover and annotation enhancements and the massive changes to the Object Table. We even created a video of a few of our favorite 9.6 enhancements. 

Here we’ll cover a few of the smaller features that were overshadowed by the flashier ones. We think that you’ll agree with us that when it comes to new features in RDi, even little things can have a have a big impact on productivity. 

Edit/Browse Toggle

How many times have you risked opening a member for edit from Remote Systems because it was just too much hassle to right click and say “Browse with …” instead? Then, you just hope you don’t accidentally make changes to the “wrong” member—or at least if you do, you notice it before closing it so that you can undo them! 

No need to live in fear of edit anymore! As of 9.6.0.2, after opening a member for edit, you can now easily switch it to browse mode. You can do this via the pulldown from the Source menubar – the “Toggle Edit/Browse Mode” option. Then again, even that takes more time than the “Browse with…” option we were avoiding. Fortunately, there’s a keyboard shortcut: Ctrl-Shift-G on Windows or command-shift-G on Mac. 

It’s also much easier to tell now which members are open for edit and which for browse. The icon preceding the member name in the Editor tab shows either a magnifying glass (browse) or a pencil (edit) as shown in the figure below.

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