Posted by Jon Sacks on January 27, 2006 at 09:34:55:
I was today looking at the e-mail functionality built into Comet and found myself scratching my head over a part of the documentation about creating an ini entry for the $catemp folder.
The documentation further went on to say that you can create an email.ini file that is specific to the user (or global) and that this email.ini file is a Comet text file.
We now seem to have the following:
1.A COSW.INI in the System folder for the user (not a Comet File)
2.A Comet Temp Directory passed in $catemp that contains mostly files for Comet Anywhere but is also used for DBMGR, VIEWMGR. This directory is truly temp and is wiped out on exit, so you can’t put any persistent files in it.
3.A Local Windows temp directory that contains the executables, .txt, .htm files.
4.A Local Comet Directory for at this point housing the email.ini (I don’t know what other COMET files we expect to be in this).
5.A COS folder that we have determined must be a system folder since it contains QSTART2, QERRFILE. (It has been verboten for a while to put these files in UTL or REL).
So this is what the configuration looks like just for the overhead of Comet:
[directory]
00 = $(catemp); Comet Temp Folder
01 = c:\comet\loc; LOC Local User Config Dir
02 = \\comet\COS; COS
Along with this we have COMET files in:
C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\local files\temp ;Temp and EXE
C:\winnt\system ;COSW.INI
Why can’t this be narrowed down and be consistent? I would have put the e-mail.ini data in the COSW.INI file under a section called [email]. Why did we add another local COMET directory to the system? As noted above COS which at one point was to be a local directory has to be a system directory to manage errors and the startup properties of the monitor.
Can we solidify a direction here? Can .ini type data not be Comet files so we do not have a need to use a separate DAB? Perhaps we need a system function called GetSystemVariable ([section],[variable name]) that returns the value from the cosw.ini file on request in an application (an enter program can do the same as well if not the OS).
It is my opinion that we need to have one place to find user based data and since we already have an .ini file, that is the place to put this information.
Comments?