Customized Cascading Drop-Down Menus in 2000i²

When my former company decided to consolidate standard mapkeys in one area, we found we had quite a few to deal with—such as printing to each company printer, inserting various sized formats, ISO tolerance blocks, BOM tables, and so on. Putting the mapkeys in the icon area would take up too much precious model space, even if we made custom buttons for each. The answer was to create a custom menu drop-down listing with cascading menus, using the config.win. Here’s how to do it.

1. Click on Utilities, Customize Screen. This puts you in the screen customization dialog box.
2. Under the Commands tab, scroll down to New Menu and highlight it. On the right in the commands area will be New Menu.
3. Drag the New Menu text button to the upper menu pull-down area. Note that a bar will indicate the placement. Drop the menu in the area you want.
4. Left-click to highlight the main menu “item,” and then right-click-hold over the main menu and select Rename. Type in the preferred name.
5. Drag a few more New Menu buttons up and place them under the previous menu. Continue until you have the menu structure you want. Since several sub-menus can be annoying to use, it’s better to keep the structure simple.
6. Rename the remaining menus with appropriate labels (e.g., Printing, Formats, BOMs).
7. To separate the menus with lines, right-click over a sub-menu and select Begin a Group. Note that you cannot start a group with the first sub-menu.
8. Now that you have completed the structure of the menu system, it’s time to add the mapkeys. Back in the Customize dialog box, click on the Mapkey area of the Categories group. This will show currently defined mapkeys.
9. To replace the smiley face icons, right-click on the ICON and select Edit Button Image. This is like painting. You can also copy, delete, or choose other ICONS as well as change the display mode (text only, ICON only, text and ICON). Explore your choices and be creative.
10. Once you get the icons the way you want, drag and drop each mapkey/ icon up to the proper location in the menu structure. Repeat as necessary. Once they are in place, you can also reorder them by using the drag and drop method.
11. If you right-click on one of the ICONs in the drop-down menu system, you can also toggle the display setting.

One last word of advice. In some builds of Pro/ENGINEER® 2000i2, multiple config.win files can present a problem. Be sure to look this up in PTC’s knowledge base against your current build. Hopefully some day we’ll be able to create custom pull-out icon menus similar to what we currently have in sketcher.

Scott Blackman is a CAE administrator and mechanical engineer. He can be reached at scott-blackman@attbi.com