About Region Properties

Many applications make use of environment variables to configure their behavior. This is generally acceptable if the application is running on a single machine and isolated in its execution from other applications. However, when running applications under Enterprise Server for .NET, their execution may be distributed across several machines, or run alongside other applications in the same process. This poses the following problems:

When run across several machines, each machine must be configured to have exactly the same environment variables
When run in the same process, different applications may require the same environment variable to be set to different values to ensure the required behavior

To resolve these problems, Enterprise Server for .NET allows properties (name/value pairs) to be specified for each region in the system. The properties are specified when a region is cold-started and held in the region database. This ensures that any application running within a region, irrespective of which machine or process that is running it, will have a consistent set of properties available for it to use. The public MicroFocus.SEE.SEP.Public.SEPInfo.GetPropertyValue() method is provided to allow applications to retrieve property values at run-time.

Properties may be specified for a region to use by:

Creating a region properties file and specifying its use for the cold-start of a region
Specifying properties within a region start-up file

If properties are specified in both a region properties file and a region start-up file, the ones in the region properties file having the same names as ones in the region start-up file will take precedence. A separate region properties file would generally only be used if more than one region required exactly the same set of properties. Recommended use would be for each region start-up file to include all the properties that applications running under it will require.

In addition to properties that are required by a region's applications, properties may also be defined for folder/path parts of program and data locations specified in the region start-up file. The following example shows how a property named MYDIR could be used to define the high-level part of a program location:

        ...
        <programs>
          <location path="${MYDIR}/bin/debug" />
          <location path="${MYDIR}/tests/progload/bin/debug" />
          <location path="${MYDIR}/tests/progload/bin2/debug" />
        </programs>
        ...