Custom Pulldown Menu source

[tbreitweiser]

Hello,

We have created custom pulldown menus that contain our own and customer blocks. I have an issue with these block pulldown menus. They all seem to work fine right now. The problem is that over the years, we have had many customers with their own blocks for us to use. These blocks are located in their own folders at the moment. These folders tend to somewhat overlap each other. What I want to do is combine some of the folders in order to clean up the system a little. But, if I just move the folders, I am afraid that my pulldown menus will not work because they won't know where to look for the blocks. How do I map the pulldown menus to the new folder location of the blocks?

Thank you in advance.

[rkmcswain]

Generally speaking, if the menu entries contain a hard coded path, then those will have to be changed.

If they do not contain a path to the block locations needs should be included in the support file search path.

[pendean]

Pulldowns require way too much maintenance and very old-school: they are best reserved for items that rarely change if ever.

Explore using ADCENTER command for using your customer blocks (place them in customer specific folders on your server) and even consider creating ToolPalettes of them direct from ADCENTER to access when they change.

[pendean]

No LISP in LT boss 🙂

[tbreitweiser]

Thank you. I have thought about creating ToolPaletts because that is what I am used to using. When I started this job the pulldowns were already in place and I had to get right up and running so I haven't had time to create any ToolPalettes. I will look into using the design center. Although, I don't have any experience using it. My only challenge now is getting guys to want to use ToolPalettes instead of their pulldowns.

[pendean]

TPs are the way to go if you have an ever changing symbols libraries and clients: unless they want to pay you to update menus full time and skip that whole billable-production thing 🙂

[tbreitweiser]

We are at a point where we will not have ever changing blocks. There may be some small changes here and there for specific clients but I think we have most of them nailed down and some of the guys would still like to continue to use their pulldown menus. I am assuming that I have to go into the CUI and change the Macros for each block that moves to a different folder and change it to its new location. Is this the way I have to do it or is there a different way? 

We have so many blocks. Now that I am making ToolPalettes containing the blocks that we use most, the ToolPallete are becoming huge. It's not a problem, but I thought that ToolPalettes were meant to be used for the most used blocks or whatever else you need to use. I am still thinking of doing it anyway and show the guys that this may be the way to go. Is there a way to have sub-menus in a ToolPalette? In other words, can I have a tab within a tab?

[pendean]

You need more that one TP for your all blocks: sort by type or size or function, whatever helps you sort through them, there are no sub-menus. TPs have groups, so you can group them together.

Or use ADCENTER: it's folder/subfolder structure is easy for most computer users to understand.

FYI: you can create a TP from ADCENTER by simply right-clicking on a folder and picking that option. Repeat for each other folder and sub-folder.