In last week’s Technical Tuesday, I discussed how to customize the NX CAM interface. Today, I will explain how to save your interface layouts as NX user’s Roles, and how to manage them.

In the out-of-the-box NX installation, all your changes in interface will be saved even after you close NX. This will happen until “Save Layout at Exit” option is turned on. You can find it in Menu / Preferences / User Interface (or Ctrl + 2).

 Introduction to NX Roles

You will find Roles tab in Resource Bar:

As you can see, they are divided in three categories:

– Content manages which sets of commands/options are available in interface and their localizations.

– Presentation applies a set of system roles to different display devices (tablets, classic monitors, High Definition monitors, etc…). Those roles saves display options mostly.

– User – this is the place where your custom user Roles will be stored.

Create new user Role

After you adjust NX interface as desired (using options which I described in my last post), right click on empty space in Roles tab of Resource Bar, and select New User Role.

In this dialog, you have few options to set:

– Name of new Role

– Path to a bitmap which you want to use as your Role’s icon (optional)

– Description (optional)

– Role Type:

Content – stores information about your custom command icons, custom shortcuts, location of those icons, grouping etc.

Presentation – stores information about display options of icons, ribbon bars, dialog boxes etc.

Content and Presentation – stores information about both Role types.

– Applications – here, you can select for which NX modules your Role applies.

– Save Dialog Memory – if you check this option, dialog boxes setting will be stored with the custom Role.

Modify your user Role

If you will make additional changes in user interface which you want to be saved in your Role, simply do the following:

– find your role icon on Roles tab of Resource Bar tab

– right click icon of your Role and select Save Role.

Move your user Role to another computer

User Roles are saved in directory:
C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Local\Siemens\NX…\roles\

To use your user Role on another computer, simply do following steps:

– Copy this file to another computer where you want to use it. Paste it to appropriate directory.

– If Roles folder doesn’t exist, create it.

– If NX session is already running, simply select Refresh command from context menu in Roles tab of Resource Bar and your new Role should became available.

Now you are done! Your custom interface layout is available on another computer.

NOTE:
There are several ways to achieve what I described here. Sharing user Roles can be also done using shared drive. But I choose this approach because I believe, this is most straight forward way which requires less effort to prepare and you don’t need to know how to customize NX installation to do this.