In this case, a customer reported that the Add to Menu list in the Command Wizard was empty. Normally, Add to Menu lists all anchor points for menus where you can add a custom command, but now it had just one entry: None.

The SDK wizards are JScript plugins, so it wasn’t hard to track down where things were going wrong. The Add to Menu list is built by parsing a header file (xsi_decl.h):

var oFSO = new ActiveXObject( "Scripting.FileSystemObject" ) ;
strFactoryPath = Application.InstallationPath( siFactoryPath ) ;
strDeclFile = XSIUtils.BuildPath(XSIUtils.Environment("XSISDK_ROOT"),"include","xsi_decl.h") ;

Based on this, it didn’t take to long to figure out the problem: the customer was starting Softimage with a shortcut to XSI.exe, so setenv.bat was never called, and XSISDK_ROOT was never set.

XSI.bat is the way to start Softimage. XSI.bat calls setenv.bat to set all the required environment variable, and then starts XSI.exe.