QUESTION Can you summarize the setup of environment variables in my CONFIG.SYS file for using SOM with VisualAge? ANSWER You can find detailed descriptions about environment variable setup in the "SOMobjects Base Toolkit Users Guide" which is shipped with the VisualAge SOMsupport component. The summary below shows how we have setup our environment variables for successful operation. If you use any of the suggested environment variable settings, you should replace 'C:\SOM' with the drive and directory that your SOMBASE environment variable is set to and 'C:\VISUALAG' with the base VisualAge drive and directory. SOMIR SOMIR specifies the list of Interface Repositories to be used. The default statement generated in your CONFIG.SYS file during installation of the SOMobjects product specifies two .IR files: SET SOMIR=C:\SOM\ETC\SOM.IR;SOM.IR You will almost always want to change this statement. For reliable operation of SOM, the statement should contain only fully-qualified library names. If you want to group all your .IR files in one place, you might change it to something like the following: SET SOMIR=C:\SOM\ETC\SOM.IR;C:\SOM\ETC\MYSOM.IR If you want to group your personal extensions to the system .IR together with the rest of the VisualAge code, you might change it to something like the following: SET SOMIR=C:\SOM\ETC\SOM.IR;C:\VISUALAG\MYSOM.IR Ref: SOMobjects Base Toolkit Users Guide, 4-46, 6-9, 6-40, and 7-3 SOMDDIR SOMDDIR specifies the directory where various DSOM files are stored (in particular, the Implementation Repository). Although SOM uses a default value if you don't specify this environment variable, we have experienced some problems that seemed to disappeared when we set the variable explicitly: SET SOMDDIR=C:\SOM\ETC\DSOM Ref: SOMobjects Base Toolkit Users Guide, 6-9 and 6-40 SOMDTIMEOUT SOMDTIMEOUT specifies how long a DSOM client should wait for an acknowledgement. If you are using local (cross-process) DSOM, you might specify a very short wait time; if you are communicating with DSOM servers across a network, you probably want a longer wait time. In any case, the default wait time of 10 minutes is probably way too long for your environment. We use 60 seconds as out timeout value: SET SOMDTIMEOUT=60 Ref: SOMobjects Base Toolkit Users Guide, 6-41 SOMDDEBUG SOMDDEBUG may be set to enable DSOM runtime error messages. If it is not set, or if it is set to 0, error messages are not issued and the only indication of an error is the exception code returned from a method invocation. If you do enable runtime error messages, you may receive some false messages (sometimes an error is an expected result of an operation), so you should carefully sort the false errors from the real ones. You might want to run with messages enabled while developing applications using SOM and with messages disabled in your deployed applications: SET SOMDDEBUG=1 Ref: SOMobjects Base Toolkit Users Guide, 6-41 and 6-68 SOMDMESSAGELOG SOMDMESSAGELOG specifies the name of a file where DSOM runtime error messages are recorded. If it is not set, the messages are written to the standard output device. Setting this variable is most useful if you want to capture debugging messages (see SOMDDEBUG above) in a deployed application rather than showing them to the application's users. Note that, due to a bug in SOM, you cannot include a drive when specifying the value for this variable: SET SOMDMESSAGELOG=\VISUALAG\SOMDMSG.LOG Ref: SOMobjects Base Toolkit Users Guide, 6-41 and 6-68