Predefined BIS Environment Variables

BIS adds the following variables to the environment under both IIS and Apache. Note that these variables are dynamically set during execution and are only available in the service program. They are not visible in your shell environment or in the .srf file.

Variable Description
BIS_PROGRAM_DIR The directory from which the BIS Service Engine is loaded. On Windows, this is typically XBIS.EXE in C:\Program Files\Micro Focus\Acucblxyz\AcuGT\bin .
BIS_FILENAME

The fully qualified name of the temporary file created for this session used to exchange data between the BIS Request Handler and the COBOL service program.

When the COBOL service program calls B$WriteResponse, the BIS Web Server reads this file to obtain the content (XML, HTML or plain text) replacing the XMLExchange tag in the response.

When the service program calls B$ReadRequest, the current web request document (XML) is written into this file. This includes any content such as the POSTed-back form variables, the request variables, and server variables, all encoded as an XML document.

By default, this file is created in the Windows TEMP

or, on UNIX, the BIS temp directory. This can be controlled during the UNIX installation with the "Name of BIS temp directory?" installation prompt and after the UNIX installation with the TempDir Server Engine Configuration. Both the BIS Request Handler and the Service Engine must have permission to create, read, and write files in this directory. The BIS installation procedure adds the required permissions to this directory.