Most Views applications might need to load predefined data files. For data files to be transparently loaded, libraries need a way to locate these data files on the disk. This is done by getting the value of the ILVHOME environment variable. If this variable is undefined, Views tries to retrieve the value of the display system resource home. Generally, this value is set to the directory where Views was installed (the one containing the subdirectories include, lib, data, and so on).

There are two global functions that force the setting of home:

Use these functions if you want to provide a reasonable default value for a specific application without asking the user to set the environment variable ILVHOME or the resource home.

The value of home is used to compute the default value of the display path, described in the next section.