The parameters of the InitialContext constructor include the location of the repository of administered objects, given as a uniform resource indicator (URI). In order for an application to establish a connection to the repository, it may be necessary to provide more information than the information contained in the URI.
In JNDI and in the .NET implementation of XMS, the additional information is provided in an environment Hashtable to the constructor.
In the C and C++ implementations of XMS, the information is provided by setting properties on the InitialContext object after it has been constructed. For C and C++, therefore, the creation of the InitialContext object and the connection to the directory (for the lookup) are done separately so that the properties can be set on the InitialContext object before an application connects to the directory to retrieve administered objects.
The location of the administered object repository is defined in the XMSC_IC_URL property. This property is typically passed on the Create call, but can be modified to connect to a different naming directory before the lookup. For FileSystem or LDAP contexts, this property defines the address of the directory. For COS naming, this is the address of the Web service that uses these properties to connect to the JNDI directory.
The following properties are passed unmodified to the Web service which will use them to use to connect to the JNDI directory.